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V. TSTILLnAN

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

D 972 ssi'"^" ^"'''"'"*' '-'^™y

3 1924 027 883 887 .„.„

The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.

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the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027883887

ON THE TRACK OF

ULYSSES

TOGETHER WITH

AN EXCURSION IN QUEST OF THE SO-CALLED

VENUS OF MELOS

TWO STUDIES IN ARCHAEOLOGY, MADE DURING A
CRUISE AMONG THE GREEK ISLANDS

W: J: STILLMAN

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

%)^t lEtibcrsiDc press, CambriDgr

1 888

//-^4'^/J

/CORNELL
NiVERS^TY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge :
Electrotyped and Printed by II. 0. Hougllton & Co.

WENDELL PHILLIPS GARRISON.

In times when the feveri&h ambition of our peojile so

generally climbs to distinction by loays offensive to the

true intellectual and moral life, and. when V3e find the old

standards of human dignity so often forgotten ; it renews

one's faith in the future of humanity to meet a man

whom neither the " Olympian dust " nor that of C'ali-

fornia lias been able to deflect from that line of perfect

rectitude of life lohich, if existence is to be anything but

an indecent scramble, ice must recognize as entitling the

man who holds it, to the highest respect of his felloiv-men.

When besides this claim to our resp)ect he has been able

to 7naintain undAmmed the lustre of a name such as

you bear, the distinction is still brighter. If therefore

my insignificant tribute were only as the dust v^hich,

catching the sunshine, mahes it visible, let me offer this

dedication in recognition of the true standard of nobility

as I knoio it in your father's son.

W. J. STILLMAN.

PREFACE.

The series of jDapers herewith committed to the more or
less permanent condition of book form were originally (less
some development of their arguments) printed in the CenUiry
magazine, being the results of an exploring visit to Greek
lands taken as a commission for that periodical. I have
sought in them to solve, in a popular form, certain problems
in archaeology which seemed to me to have that romantic
interest which is necessary to general human interest ; and
while necessarily, in such a study, dealing much with con-
jecture, I have not ventured to assume anything which I am
not satisfied is true. The problem of the so-called Venus of
Melos is one of those which archa?ology has fretted over for
two generations, and I cannot pretend to have offered a solu-
tion Avhich will command assent from the severely scientific
archaeologist ; but I have an interior conviction, stronger than
any authority of ancient tradition to my own mind, that
that solution is the true one. I do not wish it to be judged
as a demonstration, but as an induction in which a kind of
artistic instinct, not communicable or equally valuable to all
people, has had the greatest part ; and, for the rest, I am
satisfied to let it be taken by the rule of " highest probabil-
ity," by which we solve to our satisfaction, more or less com-
plete, problems of the gravest imj)ortance — a rule, indeed,
which is for many such the only standard of truth. In archge-

vi PREFACE.

ology, as in some other inexact sciences, opinion has with
most people greater weight than it always merits, but it
should have weight in proportion to the knowledge its orig-
inator may have of his subject. As to this I have done all
that any man can to penetrate to the material which exists
for forming an opinion, and I rest in the sincere conviction,
sustained through a study of many years, that the so-called
Venus of Melos is really the Nike Apteros of the restored
temple dedicated to that goddess.

I must acknowledge the courtesy of the proprietors of the
Cenhvry magazine in according me the use of the admirable
illustrations accompanying my text, which were put on the
blocks by Harry Fenn from my own sketches or photographs.

W. J. STILLMAN.

New York, September, 1887.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES 1

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY 50

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS 75

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

The Eoute of Ulysses 1

Ithaca and adjoining Islands 3

West Coast of Schema ........... 8

Geeek Boats and Eosteum of Roman Gallex ...... 13

COEFU, FEOM THE KiNG'S GaEDEN ......... 14

Poet of Phorcys and Neeiton, feom the Mouth of Ulysses' Cave . . 28

Raven's Cliff and the Fountain of Akethusa ...... 34

The Site of Ithaca — Poet Polis ........ 36

Insceiption found at Polis .......... 39

The School of Homee ........... 43

View of Same feom the West, — with paets of Pelasgic and Hellenic

Walls ... 58

Ceane from the Sea Shoee .......... 60

Dlstant View of Pale from the Citadel of Crane 63

Zante 64

Citadel of Cerigo 67

Landing-Place of the Cypeian Aphrodite oe Astaete

The so-called Venus of Melos 82

Street in Casteo ............ 84

The Site of Old Melos, from the Poet 85

Medicean Venus 88

Venus Ueania ............. 88

Capitoline Venus . 88

Venus of the Vatican" 89

Venus Anadyomene ........... 89

Venus Victels of the Louvre 89

Venus of Capua ............ 90

Rbstoeation O'F the Statue as proposed by Me. Taeeal .... 90

X LIS2' OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

||'i;A(iMp:N rs hdUNii AT Melos attkibuted to the Statue . . . . .91

Vm;i'oi.-,v (lie l)i;,ES(!iA (Front) .......... 92

Vii riiKV dii' ISiticsciA (Side) ........... 92

Viiiii-iuY jiAisiNii A\ Oi'KERiNCi (Temple of Nik^ Aptei'os, the Acropolis, Athens) 93

Vii'TdJiV iiNTViN(i llEl^ Sandal (Temple of Nike Apteros, the Acropolis, Athens) . 96
Vii'i'iuMios MOADiNCJ A 15ULL TO Sai'iufice (Temple of Nik^ Apteros, the Acropo-

lis, Athens) 97

The so-called Venus of Melos (Fvont) ....... 99

The " Venus " Restored (Front. Traced from a Photograph of a living Model) . 99

The '• Venus " Restored (Side. Traced from a Photograph of a living Model) 100

The so-called Venus of Melos (Side) ........ 100

Victory of Consani 104

Temple of Nike Apteros 105

Greek Coin ............. 106

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

CHAPTER I.

THE ROUTE OF ULYSSES.

What remains for exploration to find on the surface of our
little earth ? The north and south poles, some outlying bits of
Central Africa, some still smaller remnants of Central Asia, —
all defended so comj^letely by the elements, barbarism, disease,
starvation, by nature and inhumanity, that the traveler of
modest means and moderate constitution is as effectually de-
barred from their discovery as. if they were the moon.

What then ? I said to myself, searching for adventvu-e. Let
us begin the tread-mill round again and rediscover. I took up

2 ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

the earliest book of travel Avliieh remains to us, and set to bur-
nish up again the golden thread of the journey of the most
illustrious of travelers, as told in the Odyssey, the book of
the wanderings of Odysseus, whom we unaccountably call
Ulysses, which we may consider not only the first history of
travel, but the first geography, as it is doubtless a compendium
of the knowledge of the earth's surface at the day when it
was composed, as the Iliad was the census of the known man-
kind of that epoch. SjDread on this small loom, the fabric of
the story, of the most subtle design, — art of the oldest and
noblest, — is made up with Avarp of the Avill of the great gods,
crossed by the woof of the futile struggles of the lesser, the
demi-gods, the heroes, and tells the miserable labors of the
most illustrious of wanderers, the type for all time of craft,
duplicity, and daring, as well as of faith and patient endur-
ance.

But as Homer's humanity mixes by fine degrees with his
divinity, so his terra coqnila melts away into fiiiry-land, and
we must look for a trace written on water before landing on
identifiable shores. The story opens finding Ulysses the pri-
soner of Love and Calypso, in Ogygia, a fairy island of which
the Greek of Homeric days had heard, perhaps, from some
storm-driven mariner, or which may be a bit of brain-land.
The details of the story make it very difficult even to conjec-
ture where Ogygia was, if it was.^ How Ulysses leaves the
island alone on a raft is told by the j^oct in the fifth canto ;
how he got there the hero recounts in the narration to Alci-
notis in Phaeacia. Leaving Troy, he stops at Ismarus, a town
on the coast of Thrace, which he surprises and sacks ; but,
rej^ulsed by the inhabitants of the lands near by, rallying to
the defense, and visited by the wrath of the gods for his

^ It lias been conjectured that the Ogygia in favor of the theory, hut it is possible. 1
of Calypso was a small barren island just adopt it in the route ma]) /««fe f/e «n"eiOT.
south of Sardinia. There is no evidence

ON THE TRACE OF ULYSSES.

impiety, he is punished by a three days' gale, and reaches Cajie
Malea, where, unable to stem the north wind Avhich still per-
secutes him, he runs past Cerigo down to the African coast,
which he reaches in nine days. Here we enter into semi-
fable/ The Lotophagi seduce his men with their magic fruit

ITHACA AND ADJOINING ISLANDS,

which brings oblivion, and he is obliged to fly again. This
time he goes north, and comes to an island which lies before
the port of the Cyclops, a terrible race : giants with one eye,
and cannibals, over whose land the smoke hangs like whirl-

•" The Lotopliag'Itis has heeii recently were hard and the fare of Homeric sim-
plausihly identified with Jerba, on tlie coast plieity, should find the conditions of North
of Tunis, the word rotos being still used African existence tempting beyond resist-
there, evidently a survival of some primitive ance, and the delicious date, (constituting
language, for the date ; and the transliter- the principal and often exclusive food of the
ation of rotos to lotos being according to people, quite sufficient, in fact, for all needs,)
Grimm's law, see Reinach's letter to the a temptation to almndon the toils and dan-
Na.tion (Mar. 13, 1884) on Jerba. It is gers of a return home. The inevitable poet-
easy to understand that the Greek, coming ical exaggeration adds the magic power.
from a country where tlie conditions of life

4 ON TEE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

winds — evidently Sicily. This little island, where the Greeks
debark, is not to be identified, but is probably one of those to
the west of Sicily, called later the ^gades. Thence, after the
famous adventure of the Cyclops' cave, one of the poet's most
marvelous inventions (since every detail shows that there was
no positive knowledge of the land or its people — only a fan-
tastic tradition), they fly and arrive at the floating island of
^olus, still a creation of mythology, and thence to the shores
of the Laestrygonians, another fabulous, man-eating race, in
whose land the days are separated only by a brief pretense of
night ; escaj^ing thence with his single ship and crew, Ulysses
arrives at iEa, the island of Circe, from earliest classical times
identified with Cape Circeo, between Naples and Civita Vec-
chia. Circe sends the hero to the land of the Cimmerians,^
where time touches eternity, and the shades of the dead come
to visit the unterrified living ; and here Tiresias, the dead
soothsayer, tells the future wanderings of the Ithacan chief.
Again, returning to ^a, he is redirected toward home through
the strait where Scylla and Charybdis menace his existence.
This we recognize by later tradition as the Straits of Messina,
but the fabulous so dominates the slight element of geography
in it, that it is clear that Homer never passed that way, and
gained his knowledge onl)' from far remote report ; while his
second passage — after the sacrilege committed in the Island
of the Sun — through the straits, is i:)uzzling, and the recital
makes it clear that till Phajacia was reached the poet was not
in terra cognita.

The indications are hardly reconcilable with the map.
Leaving Circe to go home, he passes the straits, and stopping
at the Island of the Sun, his comrades commit a sacrilege
which leads to their destruction and his being driven back to

' The Cimmerians have been conjectur- tlie Novtli Sea countries, and there is noth-
ally identified with the Cymri, the Cimnie- ing but conjecture in the ease,
rian darkness with the fogs of England and

ON THE TBACK OF ULYSSES. 5

Ogygia through the straits, a solitary survivor. But on his
departure for Phseacia direct, he does not j)ass again through
the straits, evidently returning to the south of Sicily.

Released by Calypso, he goes on a raft with the sailing
direction to keep the Great Bear, " which is also called the
Wain," on his left, — that is, he sails eastward, and for seven-
teen days splits the waves, and sees on the eighteenth the
wooded mountain of the island of the Phseacians, the Scheria
of the ancients. The continuity of tradition and the consist-
ency of the narrative leave nie no doubt that this was our
Corfu, the uttermost of the lands positively known to the
geography of that day. The actuality of Scheria has been dis-
puted by certain German critics, who Avill have it that all the
local allusions of the Odyssey are imaginary. But in the
^neid, when ^ncas is going to Butrintum, Avhich is now
Butrinto, opposite Corfu on the Albanian coast, he says that
no land was in sight except Scheria. This makes it certain
that in Virgil's time there was no question on the jDoint.

Already in sight of Scheria, Ulysses is overtaken again by
the wrath of Poseidon, who unchains on him all his tempests ;
and, his raft wrecked in open sea, himself swept away from it
into the mountainous waves, he regrets not having found a
glorious death before Troy, seeing an inevitable and unhonored
end before him, with no funeral rites to give his soul peace.
Leucothea, the white goddess, throws into the black warp a
silver thread, and brings the story into new light and color.
She gives him an amulet which, by its magic, carries him
through the last of his grave perils, and preserves him when,
with a great and wrathful burst of wind, Poseidon disperses
the timbers of his raft and leaves him floating in the yeasty
sea. He seizes on one of the timbers and hoj^efully strikes
out for the land. Athene comes once more to his aid. She
chains all the Avinds except Boreas, which, wafting him for
two days and nights to the southeast, gives place to a perfect

6 ON THE TRACE OF ULYSSES.

calm, Ulysses, raised on the summit of a huge wave, looks
out and sees the land. But it is a terrible, rock-bound coast.
" He hears the roar of the waves that break on the rocks, be-
cause the shock of the great waves against the bare cliffs
sounds fearfully, and the sea, for and wide, is covered with
foam. But there is no peaceable roadstead, no port, safe re-
fuge of ships ; everywhere high, mountainous rocks and cliffs."
He appeals to the gods for pity, and just then, "while he turns
these thoughts in his spirit and heart, an immense wave
throws him on the bare shore. Then his flesh would have
been torn and his bones broken if Athene had not inspired
him. With both hands he clutches the rock and embraces it
with groans until the wave had withdrawn. He in this way
escapes death, but the return of the wave falls on him, strikes
him, and withdraws him into the open sea. He, emerging
from the depths, more prudently coasts along, swimming until
he can find an opening in the rocks where he may enter, and
finally perceives the mouth of a river. He offers a prayer to
the river god, and is heard and jDeacefully received by the
peaceable wave, which lands him on the sandy shore." The
whole of the finale of the fifth book is grand and imaginative,
especially in the description of the stormy sea and the condi-
tion of Ulysses as he sinks on the hospitable sands exhausted,
half dead from his long struggle and his two days' and nights'
swim, sustained only by one of the logs of his raft ; ^ but what
to my present purpose is of most significance is the striking
description of the west coast of Corfu and the unmistakable
evidence of the mythologist giving way to the traveler.
Here we strike the veritable track of Ulysses, and here begin
our researches. To reach this point all the commerce of the
Levant aids us — steamers from Trieste, Brindisi, Naples,
Patras, Malta, etc.

^ The text leaves a doubt if he even re- striking out with the veil of Leucothea un-
tained his hold on this, as it describes his der liis breast.

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 7

Here I found fit to my jDurpose a little yacht of twelve
tons, cutter -rigged and Malta-built, the Kestrel, with whose
master and owner I made my bargain, namely : he was to
obey all my reasonable orders for any voyage within the two
archipelagos, find his ship and crew of two sailors in all they
needed for service and safety, do my cooking, and insure
himself, for the sum of fifteen jDounds sterling a month for
three months ; and while he was putting in stores, fitting ncAv
cables to his anchors, and burnishing ujd a bit, we began to
inspect Scheria.

The popular tradition of to-day fixes the landing of Ulysses
near the actual city of Corfu, and an island is pointed out as
the ship turned to a rock ; while the spot where he landed,
and the scene of that most charming of all the episodes of his
wanderings, the meeting with Nausicaa, is put at the " one-
gun battery," just south of the harbor of Corfu. Nothing
could comport less with the descriiDtion of the Odyssey. The
Channel of Corfu, dividing the island from E2)irus, is a land-
locked basin in which no such storm could arise as Ulysses
encountered, and along Avhich no such rocks exist as are
described in the poem. The seventeen days' drift from the
westward before the tempest, and the next two days after it,
wafted by Boreas, show that he was in the open Adriatic, and
coasting along the rock-bound western coast of Scheria to find
an inlet where he might enter. The illustration shows the
character of this coast in entire concordance with the Odys-
sey ; and there is near the spot from which my view of the
west coast of Scheria is taken, a convent (which is visited by
all the tourists who, having some days in Corfu, care for the
most picturesque part of the island), and which by its name,
Pala30castrizza, shows that it stands near the site of some an-
cient city or fortress, as the term " Palgeocastron " is never
applied by local tradition to any construction not belonging
to the classical or archaic epochs. Even B}'zantuie ruins

ON THE TEAGK OF ULYSSES.

never receive the ejoithet " jDulaeos." No trace is now to be
found of any prior structure near the convent, which, while
it j)robably has some rehition to an antique site, certainly is
not on that of the city of Alciuoiis, which must have been

farther south where the shore
breaks down to a jolain.
There used to be in the is-
land an old antiquity-hunter
who brought from time to
time to sell clandestinely in

the city, objects of gold and terra-cotta, vases, etc., dug up
at a site which only he seems to have known, and of which
he would never disclose the location. On inquiring for him
on this my last visit to Corfu for these researches, he was

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 9

not to be heard of. All that we had learned from him was
that the ruins of which he knew and where he excavated in
secret were somewhere on the western coast, which corre-
sponds to my hypothesis that the capital of Alcinoiis was
there.

There is something so unpractical in the Greek laws on the
subject of excavation and exportation of antique objects, that
it is to be hoped that the shrewd common sense of the people
will ere long see their impolicy. Excavation without permis-
sion from the Government, even on one's own land, is forbid-
den, which is not unreasonable considering all things ; but
even when permission is accorded or when objects are found
by chance, the Government practically confiscates the find
when the finders are feeble, and levies a tax of half the value
when they are not. Everything, therefore, is done in secret,
and exportation by contraband is the only possible manner of
profiting by one's good fortune. The peasant who finds an
antique site carefully conceals it ; and the objects he finds,
instead of enabling the archa3ologist to classify the antiquities
by reference to their provenance, are sold to some one who
removes them from the country, and so all clue is lost to
their true archaeological position. As I shall have to show in
the course of these articles, grave loss to the science of archge-
ology sometimes occurs in this way. In this particular in-
stance the loss to me is the being unable to identify, Avith any
probability, the place Avhere or near to which Ulysses landed,
and where the classic meeting with Nausicaa took place.
When we get to Ithaca we shall find that the author of
the Odyssey knew well every foot of land he describes ; and
the scene of Ulysses' disaster, already translated, accords so
well with the actual topography that it is difficult to suppose
that a mere inspiration dictated it, and that the author was
not well acquainted with the island of Scheria, whose capital
was Phseacia.

10 ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

The claim of the city of Corfu to be the site of the ancient
Phseacia rests on nothing but the fact that it is the only city
in the island ; but the ever-tranquil bay on which it lies, and
the fact that Ulysses, instead of searching for a place where he
could land, would rather have had to search for a place where
he could not, shows conclusively that no part of the eastern
coast is entitled to the honor. The " one-gun battery," where
local tradition places his landing, is perhaps the least likely
point, as no running stream is to be found near there. The
lake, which is now suggested as the tranquil water in which
Ulysses came to land, must then have been much larger than
at present, and now in nowise resembles a river : it is the half-
filled arm of the sea into which a wide basin of marshy land
has been for centuries draining, but into which no water-
course leads, and the view seen from above the " one-gun "
needs scarcely a commentary to show its entire incompatibility
with the Odyssey.

The capital of Alcinoiis was, we are told by Homer,
founded by his father Nausitlioiis. His people were formerly
inhabitants of Hyj^eria, " near the Cyclops," and were by
these latter so ravaged and overborne that they emigrated to
Pha^acia. The generally accepted location of the Cyclops in
Sicily suggests that Hyperia was probably there or in Italy ;
and that the Phgeacians may have been related to the Siculi ;
since the Pclasgi, who invaded Italy from the north, and, unit-
ing with the Umbri, sjiread over the whole of southern Italy,
expelling the aborigines, are continually confounded by the
earliest traditions with the Cyclops. As, from all we know,
the Tyrrhene Pelasgi were the earliest metal-workers in that
part of Europe,^ and as the Cyclops, the children of Hejihaistos,

' I saw, at a recent meeting of the Ger- have led me to the conclusion that bronze

man archseologieal Institute at Rome, ex- working- was independently discovered in

quisite bronze castings found in a lake city Italy at a ])eriod long anterior to any inter-

of northern Italy, of whicli the latest pos- course with Greece, and that it i)robably

sibly assignable date is 1500 b. o. Various went from Italy to Corinth, where it is said

data, which it is not the place here to discuss, to have been discovered.

ON THE TRACK OF ULYliSES. 11

the great metal-worker, are a mythological idealization of a
race of smiths who had a habit of covering the eyes, for pro-
tection from sparks, with a screen in which a single hole was
cut to see through, which was transmogrified into a single eye
in the middle of the forehead, there is nothing unlikely in the
inference that the Pelasgi and CycloiDS were identical, and that
the Phaeacians were refugees from the conquest of southern
Italy by that formidable people. That they were not Greeks
we know by their absence from the catalogue of the " Iliad,"
where all the Hellenic tribes were recorded in their places in
the league.

The Corfiotes of to-day boast of descent from the Phoeni-
cians, and certainly they are not to be measured by the same
standard as the Greek race in general. Their reputation for
dishonesty has given rise to a Greek proverb, which relegates
a person of more than usual craftiness and bad fiiith to the
" Corfiotes." " He behaves like a Corfiote " is the greatest
reproach the continental Greek can bring against a man who
is too clever in business matters. In character as well as
history the Corfiote has little in common with Greece. As he
had no place inside the line drawn around the Hellenic world
at the great critical, even if mythical, ejjoch assigned to the
siege of Troy, so in his latest history he has always maintained
a position more or less apart. Diodorus Siculus makes the
Homeric name of the city, Phasacia, to have been derived from
Phaeacus, son of Poseidon, and places his reign contemporary
with the Argonauts, as Phaeacus protected Jason against the
king of lolcus when, returning from Colchis with Medea, he
took refuge at Scheria. Mythology begins with it in the
combat of Zeus and Poseidon in their struggle for supremacy
in the government of the universe, and finishes with Ulysses'
visit. History commences with the arrival of a colony of
Corinthians under Chersicratcs, Avho built a city which he
called Chrysopolis. This was probably Corfu, for, as the immi-

12 ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

gration of Nausithoiis, coming from Italian shores, first estab-
lished itself on the coast looking toward their old home, so the
Corinthians, coming by the islands and the Epirote shores,
would find their first landing in the spacious and tranquil bay
formed by the crescent-shaped island, Avhich, at its extremes,
approaches the mainland. The Hellene of Corinth brought
all the seeds of the virtues and vices of his national tempera-
ment to the fertile soil of Corcyra, as it is henceforward called
by the Hellenic chronicles, colonization and war with their
neighbors filling all their early history. They founded, accord-
ing to their tradition, Apollonia and other cities on the main-
land ; but, as among the ruins of those cities there are Pelasgic
remains, it is not to be supposed that they were the first colo-
nists, but that they merely colonized, as the Romans did in the
later times, with a dominant population, cities in decline or
too weak to maintain their indej^endence. This is, in ancient
Greek history, oftener the meaning of the word colonize than
the founding of a new city. To get a clear idea of the con-
dition of this part of the world at the beginning of historical,
or even heroic record, Ave must take into consideration that
an epoch of civilization, perhaps of empire, had long preceded
the awakening of the Hellenic national life ; an ej)och which
ought, perhaps, to be measured by centuries, if we could mea-
sure it at all, and whose record is preserved in the stupendous
ruins we call Pelasgic, a name applied by the Greeks to a
people who preceded them, derived possibly from the Greek
name of the stork, indicating a migrating or wandering people,
— wandering, probably, because their empire had been broken
up by some newer and stronger race, but which the various re-
maining traditions accord in asserting to have once held great
rule in Italy, where they were known also as Tyrrhenians,
in the Peloponnesus, and in Crete. We shall see presently
some indications of the correctness of the assumption that
they preceded by an infinite period the great assemblage of

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

Greeks, which the ex23eclition to Troy perhaps marks, j^erhaps
symbolizes ; but at present I have only to do with the history
and mythology of Corfu, which is in no way that we can dis-
cover connected with the Pelasgi.

The first wars of Corcyra were, as was to be expected of an
enterprising peojile, with the mother country ; but as in those
days piracy was the chief business of every maritime people,
ivar was perhaps only a normal condition. The Persian inva-
sion brought Corcyra into the Hellenic league, but, with the
duplicity of Avhich the race furnished so many iustances in

GREEK BOATS AND ROSTRUM OF ROMAN GALLEY.

ancient times, the Corcyriote fleet only sailed, and took good
care not to be in time for the battle, fearing the vengeance of
the Persians. Their prudence brought on them, after the
defeat of Xerxes at Salamis, a combined attack of the Pelo-
ponnesian States. As the union of these was always a chal-
lenge to Athens, she sided with the Corcyriotes, and the re-
sulting war plunged Corcyra into intestine and social strife, in
which the most horrible cruelties were perpetrated by the
islanders ; and the animosities and renewals of revolt and war,
w^hich the divisions of the classes of the population gave
opportunity for, reduced the island to anarchy and helpless-
ness. Their subsequent history is one of repeated subjuga-
tion and revolt. After losing even the relative independence
of alliance with Athens, they were conquered by Agathocles
of Syracuse, Pyrrhus, and finally by Home.

ON THE TRACK OF, ULYSSES.

From this time Corcyra was the base of the Roman mihtary
movements against the Levantine enemies of the republic.
The commanding position of the island has, from that day to
this, made it an object of the covetousness of all the mari-
time powers of the Mediterranean by turns. In the civil wars
of Rome, the island espoused the part of Pompey, later of

Bruta> .md C.l'^^iu'5, and then,
ah^a}s unfortunate, of An-
tony. After the battle of Ac-
tium, fought almost ^^'ithin
sight of its shores, Corcyra was
besieged, taken, and rigorously
punished by Augustus, and then relegated to an obscurity out
of which only the great Ottoman invasion of Europe brought
it. It was involved more or less in the Saracenic, Bulgarian,
Norman, and Neaf)olitan wars and invasions, and finally threw
itself into the arms of Yenice to save itself from conquest by
Genoa. From this time (1386) the history of Corcyra, become
Corfu, until the overthrow of the republic by Napoleon, is iden-
tified with that of Venice, and all the remains or structures
in the island date from the Venetian occupation.

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 15

In 1537 the troops of the Sultan, under the orders of the
renegade Barbarossa, made a descent on the ishmd and hiid
siege to the city, which, taken by surjjrise, was ill-provisioned
and with a small garrison. The Turkish fleet blockaded the
port, and the troops beleaguered the city by land. The garri-
son was under the terrible alternative of being starved into
surrender speedily or dismissing all the useless mouths. The
latter Avas, on the Avhole, safer, for the surrender would have
been disastrous even to the non-combatants, who were to
Turkish barbarity no less obnoxious than the soldiers. The
old men, women, and children were sent out of the city,
perhaps the most horrible necessity which ever befell brave
men. A successful defense of the city justified, in a military
point of view, the terrible sacrifice ; and, after a long and
obstinate siege, Barbarossa, his army nearly destroyed by
battle and pestilence, withdrew, defeated. The island was
almost depopulated, ravaged, and so utterly impoverished that
Venice was obliged to send the people seed-corn and beasts to
till their fields. Nearly the whole of the nobility of the island
had been killed in the defense.

To be in readiness for a similar emergency, the Senate aug-
mented the already strong fortifications. The New Fort, as it
is still called, was constructed, and, with a paternal regard for
the Avell-being of the islanders, which Venice did not always
show for her Greek insular possessions, institutions were
founded and regulations made which contributed greatly to
the prosperity of the island.

In 1716 a new and determined attack was made by the
Turks, under the leadership of Achmet III. Their fleet drove
off* that of Venice, and an army of thirty thousand men was
debarked and laid siege to the city, Avhose defense was directed
by Count Schulembourg. The outlying heights were taken
quickly, and the garrison, shut in the inner line of fortifica-
tions, received the desperate assault of the Turks on the main

16 ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

works with more desperate resistance. After twenty days of
incessant attack, tlie Turks carried the outworks, penetrated
to the Phice d'Armcs, which is under the walls of the New
Fort, and attempted to scale the walls themselves.

" The assault lasted more than six hours with an incredible
fury. The women brought assistance to the defenders, and
the priests, crucifix in hand, ran along the ramparts or threw
themselves into the fight. Finally a vigorous sortie terminated
this bloody day. Attacked on every side, the assaulting force
beat a retreat and lost all the outposts it had taken. A tem-
pest, which had burst on them in the night, completed the
work of defeat, and, seized by panic, they embarked precij^i-
tately, leaving baggage and artillery behind them. In forty-
two days they had lost fifteen thousand men." {Isles de la
Grece.)

The victory Avas commemorated by a statue to Scliulem-
bourg, which no subsequent conquest has disturbed, and Avhich
stands on the parade-ground among monuments of greater or
less good taste (generally the latter), to mark the history of
the island in modern days.

From that day to this, Avith the excej)tion of an occasional
emeute, nothing has come to disturb the peace of Corfu, and
the once so splendid courage of the inhabitants has gone out
like a fire Avithout a draught. There is jorobably no province
of the Hellenic kingdom so devoid of martial spirit or the
virtues that groAv out of it. It is noAV a most delightful
Avinter resort, a Fortunate Isle left out of the current of
political events and given over to invalids and sportsmen, AAdio
find on the opposite Albanian coast the best shooting on the
Mediterranean. The old citadel, Avitli its double peak, serves
as a light-house to the lines of steamers which furrow the
Adriatic, cross, and make Corfu their entrepot between Trieste,
Venice, Brindisi, Alexandria, Constantino])le, and Smyrna.

The English occupation endoAved the island Avith good roads,

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.' 17

most of which are mamtained in foir condition still ; and a
winter's sojourn here lacks nothing which could be expected
in the compass of ten by thirty miles, with two posts per week
from Europe. The fruits are those of the northern Mediter-
ranean in great jjerfection, the oranges being only second to
those of Crete ; the waters are still well suj^plied with fish,
though the people do all they can to exterminate them by
the use of dynamite in fishing ; and the Bella Venezia is
a hotel which, though still strange to the resources of our
American caravansaries, is more appro23riate to the ways of the
East and of idle peoj^le than are ours. The kindly, honest old
host, appropriately known as Dionysos, lacks but little of
giving to the stranger the hospitality of Alcinous. And life is
so cheap that one who has Avorn out the world and realized an
income of a thousand dollars a year may find a Macarian
peace in an uj^per room of the Bella Venezia, with windows
looking out on the beautiful mountains of Epirus, snow-clad
all winter, and the bright blue of the intervening sea, with the
coming, going, and merely passing ships of all nations ; and,
when the sun is low, have a comfortable carriage to thread the
labyrinths of the immense olive groves which form almost the
only shade in the island. Here one meets men of all races
— Turkish reliefs on their way from Stamboul to Durazzo,
or Scutari of Albania ; white-skirted palikars from Ejiirus ;
Eastern Jews, with their characteristic long robes ; Persians,
Montenegrins, Peloponnesians, etc, who, changing steamers
here, or glad to breathe a land air during the stay in port of
their steamers, stroll up and down the parade, with the easy-
going townsmen and tourists of all nations, seeing the island
in comfort or rushing over it in the custody of Cook or Gaze,
to carry away a confused remembrance of Corfu and Syra,
hardly recalling which was which.

Ulysses was dismissed from Scheria loaded with presents.
The modern voyager is not so fortunate. The souvenirs of

18 ON TEE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

Corfu which he will carry with him, whether antique or
modern, will rarely recompense him for the outlay. The bric-
a-brac shops abound in false antiques, arms from Ej)irus, Greek
laces, and Eastern embroideries, which no wise buyer meddles
with, dear beyond measure as they are. Be content with the
moderate pension of the Bella Venezia, and tempt not Mercury
in his favored island ; he was the god of thieves as well as
merchants, and was never better worshiped in his capacity of
joint protector than in the bric-a-brac shops of Corfu.

Ulysses went to Ithaca in one night, in what must have
been, for the time, the quickest passage on record, and a great
credit to the rowers of King Alcinoiis. Nothing like it is to
be expected to-day, though it is not imj)Ossible still, and the
steamer which does the service makes a long, roundabout
voyage. Our yacht, though small, was too big for rowing,
and we had no special motive, as Ulysses had, to get quickly
to Ithaca. As our route lay by Santa Maura, which has to
do with the story of the Odyssey, if not with the wander-
ings from Troy, we turned aside from his course to visit it.
Nericus, as it was called in Homeric nomenclature, probably
formed part of the realm of the Ithacan kings, Laertes men-
tioning his conquest of it ; but it is not mentioned in the
catalogue, and we may conclude was not Greek. It is barely
separated from the mainland by a narrow channel, cut by the
Corinthians through a flat, which more anciently, however,
must have been a shallow arm of the sea. The action of the
elements is filling it up again, so that time may unite it to the
Acarnanian shore, as in the Homeric days ; for Laertes, in
recalling to Ulysses some of his old exploits (Odyssey, book
24), says : '* Ah, that it had pleased Zeus, Apollo, Athene, to
have borne me to your j^alace, such as I was when, at the
head of the Cephalonians, I took, on the continent, the proud
city of Nericus ! " In the catalogue of the Iliad we find that
" Ulysses commands the magnanimous Cephalonians ; the

01^ THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 19

warriors of Ithaca ; those of shady Neriton, of Crocyles, of the
barren iEgilipos ; those of Samos [Same of Cephulonia, not
the island Samos], of Zacynthus [Zante], and of the adjoining
continent. Twelve ships Avhose sides were painted red fol-
lowed him." But Nericus occurs nowhere.

Nothing illustrates so strikingly the change in the condition
of civilization as the relations between the ancient and mod-
ern chief cities of the Greek islands. The substitute for the
stately Nericus is a low, flat, uninteresting town, built on the
plain which lies north of Nericus, and next the roadstead.
To the east lie the rugged mountains of Acarnania and the
Gulf of Arta ; north, in full view, is the modern fortress of
Prevesa ; further, and to the east, Arta, the ancient Ambracia ;
and the long strip of low coast which stretches away from
Prevesa northward is dotted with masses of ruin ^ those of
the imperial Nicopolis, monument of the victory of Actium,
won in those blue waters. The idle shepherds of those days,
watching their sheep on these hills, saw the crash of prows,
the flight of Egypt, and the shame of Antony. Perhaps,
through this very channel, where the light-draft caique now
glides, to gain the shelter of the islands going southward, ran
the fugitive ships of Cleopatra ; for this was evidently the
channel by which the craft of those days avoided the stormy
capes of Cephalonia and the southern point of Nericus.
Standing on the eastern brow of the hill on which the old
city stood, and on which its ruins still mark a noble past, is
the citadel. Along the plain, among the olives, the fragments
of tombs lie spread like flocks of sleeping sheep. The port
was on the bay now connected Avith the northern roadstead
by the Corinthian Channel ; and two or three underground
passages, in part cut in solid rock, one being high enough for
a man to walk in upright, and cut as cleanly and evenly as
the walls of a chamber, connect it with the citadel which
dominates the northern part of the island, Avhcre the fertile

20 OJV THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

plains lie. The ruins arc of various ages, embracing Pelasgic,
but mainly later, and coming clown to Roman times ; and the
great extent of the Pelasgic enceinte, which almost everywhere
underlies the Hellenic and Roman work, shows the great early
imj^ortance of the city. The citadel is bold and commanding,
and looks out on the northern and western seas on one side,
and the Corinthian Channel and the inland sea on the other,
and down to Ithaca, which, indeed, is visible from some points.

The post-Homeric name of Nericus was Leucadia. ^neas
is represented as having debarked there, and Apollo had a
temple on the heights which terminate the island to the south.
From the cliffs which overlook the Adriatic on that side,
Sappho is said to have leaped into the sea, overcome by the
sorrows of her unhappy love. " Sappho's Leaj)" is the name
of the cliff to this day, and my Corfiote captain, as we glided
by, told me how the place was celebrated because the Duchess
of the island had jumped off into the sea from it, and that
the peoj)le had put up a great inscription in memory of it.
He had never seen it, and did n't know exactly where the leap
was made ; but I think he was very excusable for his igno-
rance, as the action of the sea, driven as it is sometimes by the
furious southwest wind into a very " hell of waters," which
consume the rock in their fury, must long ago have brought
down all that classical times had seen of the rock, and changed
the flice of the cliff entirely. As it no'w is, I could find
hardly a point where a new Sappho would have found a wel-
come so gentle as the embrace of the Adriatic ; masses of
fallen rock and stony beach would have given a harsher but
more speedy end.

Mythology says that when Adonis was killed, Ajihrodite,
seeking him through all the earth, finally found him lying-
dead in the temple of the Erythraean Apollo. The Sun-god,
to cure her grief, counseled her to throw herself from the cliffs
of Leucadia into the sea, where she would find oblivion. Here

OiY THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 21

Zeus, who seems to have found obstacles in the way of his
legitimate marriage, and to have wooed Hera at first with less
success than attended his mortal loves, found by the same pro-
cess a salutary indifference to the charms of his divine sister
and afterwards sjaouse, to which temporary coolness on his
part might, perhajjs, be ascribed his ultimate success with the
fickle fair.

And here, in practical historical times, criminals condemned
to death were thrown into the sea. The peojile (who even
now preserve a certain sympathy with the criminal class) used
to tie numbers of birds to the limbs of the condemned and
cover them with feathers to break the force of their fall, and
then send boats to joick them up. If they survived, they were
pardoned.

In modern times nothing has occurred to signalize Santa
Maura, or " Levkadi," as it is indifferently called. It was
taken and retaken by Turks and Venetians, and finally passed
with the rest of the Ionian Islands to the heirs of Venice.
Its peojile are a mild, hospitable race, to whom the stranger is
a guest almost in the antique sense.

We loitered along with a feeble west wind, under the
western shore, bold and desolate, of Levkadi, its high peaks
above us breaking into ravines, and the ravines ending in cliffs,
doubled " Sappho's Leap," and before us lay Ithaca, the ten-
years-sought-for island. To the north was still visible a dim
film which we knew to be Corfu ; nearer, one less dim, which
we recognized by its outline to be Paxos, an island without
history and without interest, but Avliich tradition asserts to
have been once united to Corfu and separated by an earth-
quake. The breeze quickened at night-fall as we went round
the point of the Leukadian cliffs, and before us lay the inland
sea, which, sej)arating Santa Maura, Ithaca, Cephalonia, and
Zante from the mainland, is a sort of smooth-Avater channel
for ships coming out of the Gulf of Patras, or of Corinth, as

22 ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

it is indiflPerently called, or running in there from Corfu and
the upper Adriatic. The bolder portions of Ithaca are almost
utterly denuded rock. One hollow, like a great theatre, opens
northward between two bold rocky peninsulas, and this is the
vale from which the Odyssean city drew its jirosperity. Olive-
trees and vineyards still cover its slopes, and suggestions of
white villages flashed out from the silvery green sea of olive
orchards as we flitted by, running under the eastern shore to
catch the breeze that blew down from the mountain as the sun
sank. We had all the wind our cutter could carry, and bowled
along through the smooth water in the lee of the island like a
steamer. Far ahead we saw, in the gathering night, a faint
glimmer of light, which seemed too fliint for a light-house, and
too steady for a house-light, and which perplexed us exceed-
ingly, as no light was indicated on the chart ; but, creeping
along shore, we found that it was a tiny chapel standing on a
long and menacing peninsula of bare rock, in the window of
which burned a lamp, — in all probability the fulfillment of a
vow made by some devout Greek sailor who had escaped the
teeth of this Scylla ; or the perpetuation of an antique custom,
when the little chapel of St. Nicholas, protector of sailors,
was a temple of NejDtune, whom the saint replaces in function
and respect of the seafarer. Nothing is more interesting in
this part of the world than the evidences of the unbroken
continuity of religious tradition, and the gradual change of
paganism into Christianity, - — if, indeed, the change has taken
place, which in certain districts I am scarcely disj^osed to
admit. The little chapels which one finds planted by the sea-
side or solitary roadside in all the Greek islands, and even on
the mainland, Avill generally be found to have some antique
material in them, some evidence of the earlier shrine which
honored one of the Greek gods. The Olympians have their
homologues if not their homonyms. Zeus goes back to his
awful antique dignity of the All-father, the original sole deity

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 23

of the Pelasgian, worshiped in a temple not made by hands,
under the speaking oak of Dodona, the one God, maker of
heaven and earth, the Dyaus or Sky-father of our Aryan an-
cestors, and Zeus (Deus, Divus) of the western branch of the
family ; but his creatures and children fall into the lower
rank of saints : Apollo becomes St. Elias (Helios) ; Athena,
the Virgin Mary ; Ares, St. George ; Poseidon, St. Nicholas,
etc., etc.

We left St. Nicholas and his night-light behind us, and,
rounding a cape into the Bay of Vathy, saw in the dim
distance the light of the outer light-house, and met the wind
coming out of the bay. It was late, and beating up the bay
would be a long job ; so Ave turned in and left the navigation
to the sailors. The next morning we woke, as Ulysses did,
under the shadow of Neriton, where the Phseacians had left
him sleei:)ing.

" In one part of Ithaca is the port of Phorcys, the old man
of the sea ; the bold jDromontorics forming the circuit protect
it from the great waves and the sounding winds. The ships
which have once entered it may lie without cables. At its
extremity is a bushy olive-tree whose shadow hides a de-
licious grotto and shady retreat, sacred to the Nereids. In
this asylum, refreshed by an inexhaustible fountain, are placed
the vases and the jars of stone. ... It has two entrances :
one, looking toward the north, is for the use of men ; the
other, to the east, is more divine. Never man enters there :
it is the path of the immortals.

" The olive-tree and the grotto are known to the Phaeacians.
There they go. The ship runs half-way up the beach, so
strong is the stroke of the rowers. Then these land, carry-
ing Ulysses, still plunged in profound sleep, and lay him on
the sand, wrapped in brilliant blankets and woven linen."

Waking, he is bewildered by the artifice of Athena, and
does not recognize his native island; but finally, when he

24 ON Tim TRACK OF ULYSSES.

appeals to the Goddess to tell him the truth, if he be in
Ithaca, she replies to him : —

" Now I will show you the localities of Ithaca, that you
may doubt no more. There is the port of Phorcys, old man
of the sea ; there, at the extremity of the port, the bushy
olive-tree, and under its shade a delicious grotto, dark resting-
place, and sacred to the nymphs. This is the vaulted grotto
where often you sacrificed entire hecatombs to the nymphs.
There is Mount Neriton, shadowed by forests."

The identification of this little bay or " port " is the one
contested point of the topography, and, on account of its
greater commodiousness, Port Vathy (at the left as we enter
the roadstead) is maintained by some authorities to be the
" port of Phorcys." The geology of the two bays is conclusive
evidence in favor of that which the Greeks now call Port
Dexia (the right-hand port), as Port Vathy has not, and by
its geological formation never could have had, a beach such as
Homer describes, and which was indispensable to the ancient
sailor, while that of Dexia is superb — a soft, unbroken
stretch of sand. Other objections we shall meet further on.

[Note. — The puzzling question of the forms of classical names in these articles
has been carefully considered, and the difficulty of adapting consistent classical
orthography to popular archaeology seems too great to be overcome in this place.]

CHAPTER II.

The changes of the conditions of existence in what we call
civilization resemble, a good deal more than we generally
imagine, the progress of a horse in a tread-mill. Comparing
the evidences of a higher prosperity which history affords with
what we now find in Ithaca, Ave have ample ground to suj)pose
that, while our part of the world has made certain advances,
this has rather retrograded. A scanty population, the greater
part of the island indeed uninhabited ; ruins of great cities
where now there is not a shepherd's hut ; a wretched, sordid
life in which not even poetry, the offspring of sorrow, can find
a foothold ; utter insignificance in the world of men, — this is
Avhat the island of Ulysses, which fills so large a part of the
Old World's poetry, shows us to-day.

We woke like Ulysses under the shadow of Neriton, but not
like him under the olive's shade. Our yacht was anchored in
a tranquil and land-locked bay, Port Vathy (the deep), round
the shores of which stretch and gleam, white in the sun, the
houses of the modern capital of Ithaca, a dull, utterly unin-
teresting town, neither Avhose past nor present is worth a note.

Devastated by Turks and corsairs by turns, conquered by
Christian and Infidel, the tribute of death and pillage had at
one time nearly left the island a desert, and Venetian chroni-
cles report the repeopling of it by a Slavonic colony ; but
there is good evidence, as we shall see presently, that there
was never quite an end of the original stock. Though one
does see occasionally strongly Slavonic faces, the population is
now in language and manners purely Greek, with some of the
worst traits of the race strongly developed. By good chance I

26 ON THE TRACK OF ULTSSES.

found an old acquaintance in Mr. Caravia, a deputy for Ithaca
to the Greek Assembly, then in vacation, and I had a letter to
Aristides Dendrinos, the principal personage of the island ; and
through their united attentions we were made as much at
home in Ithaca as possible. But the Ithacans are shrewd folk,
sharp dealers who look at foreigners as the Hebrews did on
the Egyptians, as made to be spoiled ; and we were unlucky
enough to have arrived in the Greek Lent, which, as they
observe it, is equal to starvation to outsiders. The excellent
wine of Ithaca, one of the best of Greek wines, is quite
worthy its ancient reputation ; but flesh Avas unattainable,
and fish so rare, owing to the people's habit of killing them
with dynamite, that we could not get enough for a breakfast.
The fowls in Greek lands, living an outcast life, never fed, but
expected to grow, as the partridges do, on the bounties of
nature, hardly offer a compensation for the trouble of picking
their bones. They combine all the misfortunes of the wild
and domesticated conditions, with none of the advantages of
either, and offer a scant resource to the caterer. We made
haste to see w^hat was to be seen in Ithaca, and study our
great predecessor's footjirints, but we found the learning
harder than the living. The island Greek is quick-witted,
and, like the Irishman, never confesses himself at fault in
anything you want to know, especially in things connected
with ancient history or archaeology. He solves the hardest
and most obscure problem by a bold dash, and is even surer
than Schliemann in his breezy inductions. It is amusing and
cheering to see a man so cock-sure of what archaeology has
puzzled over so many years. On inquiring for a guide to
shorten my researches (for, though Homer is guide-book
enough for Ithaca, one may be a long time in tracing out the
Odysseun movements by the poem), every one Avas ready to
show me everything. Before leaving I found an intelligent
guide, as such go, in one Angelo Persego, whose name I

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 27

record for the benefit of such of my readers as may be tempted
(out of the Greek Lent) to visit Ithaca. But here let me
droj) a word of advice for all voyagers in Greek lands. Take
a guide for lodgings and living, but never place any confidence
in his identifications or local traditions. He may be right,
but the chances are nine to one he is not. He may even have
been over the ground before, but his assurance to that effect
is no evidence. I found the men I selected utterly ignorant,
as usual, of almost all I wanted to learn ; but I found a little
book by G. F. Bowen, one time Fellow of Brasenose and
President of the Ionian University, which, though dated in
1850, gives a sufficient clue to the toiDography to enable one
to dispense with a guide, except to find the best roads.

Vathy does not occur in the Odyssey under any name, nor
is there any trace of antique structures about it. In the illus-
tration the narrow entrance at the right is Vathy ; the cove
in the centre, with the island ofi" it, is the port of Phorcys,
where Ulysses was landed, and Avliich, for the uses of ancient
mariners, who beached their ships instead of anchoring them,
was a better port than Vathy. It corresponds in the minutest
detail to Homer's account of it, — a smooth, sandy beach,
complete shelter from all winds, and only varying in any
particulars in its surroundings by a greater distance from the
grotto where the Phseacians hide the presents Ulysses brings
with him ; but of this more is to be said.

The Odyssey gives no intimation of any city near the land-
ing-place. The port of Ulysses' own capital was much nearer
Phgeacia, and the shij) might have landed him at his OAvn door.
The reason of this excessive caution was that during so long
a time he had had no ncAvs from home, and his Phseacian
friends knew that he might find his city in the hands of an
enemy.

Awaking, then, from the sleep in Avhich he had been so
gently landed by the crew of the Phaeacian ship, he finds

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

himself in a strange land, as he supposed, and in complete
solitude, and arms himself with his habitual cunning, distrust-
ing everything. When Athena comes to him in the form of
a shepherd, he asks where he is ; and being told that he is at
last in the long-sought Ithaca, he is transported wdth joy, but
conceals his emotion and addresses the goddess with these
hasty w^ords, disguising the
truth and telling his story
falsely, ahvays turning in
his mind many artifices :
I, too, have heard, in the
far-off, immense island of

PORT OF PHORCYS AND NERITON, FROM THE MOUTH OF ULYSSES' CAVE.

Crete, of the island of Ithaca. It is, then, in that country
that I have arrived with my treasures. I have left an equal
part to my children because I fly from my native land, where
I killed the dear son of Idomeneus," etc., etc., going on wdth
a long history to account for his presence in Ithaca, a place
unknowai to him, which fable he only drops when Athena

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 29

throws off her disguise ; but he still is uncon^'illced that he is
in Ithaca. She calls his attention to Neriton in front of him,
and having convinced him, helps him hide his treasures in the
grotto, when they sit doAvn under the olive-tree over its
entrance, and she tells him how matters stand at home, and
contrives plans for getting rid of the pretendants, who would,
no doubt, put an end to him if he fell into their hands. This
seems to be his conviction, for he exclaims : " Great gods ! if
you had not enlightened me I should have perished in my
palace, like Agamemnon. Come, let us plan a means by which
I may revenge myself on them all." This hint of the fate
of Agamemnon, whose end he had learned, is the clue to his
cautiou^s deportment. They plan as folloAvs : He will be dis-
guised by Athena, so that not even his wife shall know him,
and will then go to Eumpeus, who keeps his swine by the
Raven's Cliff, near Arethusa's fountain, and wait Avith him
studying up the position, Avhile she goes off to Laccda^mon to
bring back Telemachus, Avhoni she had sent there nominally
to get ncAvs of his father, but really, as she informs Ulysses, to
give him an opportunity, hitherto Avanting, to see the Avorld
and acquire rcnoAvn. Here they separate, and Ulysses takes
the secret path.

The 2:)osition of the grotto makes the only difficulty in tra-
cing all his movements ; for it is not, as one Avould expect from
the text, at the head of the port, strictly speaking, but at the
head of the little ravine Avliich ends in the port, a good quar-
ter of an hour's Avalk from the shore, even making alloAvance
for all the recession of the water-line, AA'hich has evidently
been considerable. The grotto itself corresponds exactly with
the description, and can be entered by mortals only in the
usual way, by the small ojoening Avhich looks toAvard the port.
" It has tAvo entrances : one, turned toAvard the breath of
Boreas, is for human use ; the other, toAvard that of Notes, is
more divine. Never man enters by that ; it is the Avay of the

30 ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

immortals." The human entrance is a low, almost inyisible
opening, or at least, easily passed without notice, at a short
distance. Even now, when all vegetation has disappeared
from around it, and the olive-trees come only half-way u]) the
hill, it would easily be hidden by a large stone, as Minerva
hides it. The entrance, low and precipitous, widens rajoidly
within, and we descend by what might once have been arti-
ficially prejDared stcjDS to a vault-like cave, sixteen to twenty
feet in diameter, with a curiovis recess at the farther end, and
at the top of the vault another opening, like the top window
of the Pantheon of Rome, or any of the circular temples
whose form was derived from the vaulted tomb or treasury of
Pelasgic architecture. At first sight I thought this opening
might have been artificial, but on close examination I saw that
the formation of the rock led to it naturally, and that, hardly
large enough to admit a human body readily, it could only, if
enlarged, be entered by a person's being let down with a cord.
This is the " immortals' entrance." Under this opening lies
a huge heap of stones, the accumulation of centuries, for the
lower portions are cemented together by the stalagmitic
deposit from the rock above ; and the walls of the grotto,
despite the breaking oW of every attackable stalactite, are also
formed of carbonate of lime so deposited. The difi^erence be-
tween the actual distance from the water's edge to the grotto
and that which is indicated by the narrative of the Odyssey
is not more than a fair poetic license would permit ; or the
memory of the narrator, having known the localities, might
well in a few years of absence lea^e out this short distance.

The Odyssean topography is greatly confused to the modern
traveler by the fact that the Homeric city undoubtedly stood
at the northern end of the island, and far remote from the
modern city as Avell as from the landing-place of Ulysses and
the pig-pens of Eumaeus. The view from the grotto gives us,
at the left, a bay of Avhich Yathy and Phorcys are tributaries.

ON THE TRACK OF ULTSSUS. 31

This cuts the island nearly in two, a narrow ridge of rock
only connecting its two great masses. On the north is the
site of the Homeric city, as I shall joresently show ; but on
the south are the Raven's Cliff and the fountain of Ai-ethusa,
together with an ancient ruin known by the people as the
" Castle of Ulysses." These ruins are of the earliest form
of Pelasgic, commonly named Cyclopean, though there is no
justification for any distinction between the " Pelasgic " and
the " Cyclopean," or any proper distinction of styles, as they
run into each other, from the form shown at " Ulysses' Castle "
to the most elaborate and carefully fitted polygonal which
we shall find at Same on the opposite shore of Cephalonia.
The walls of Ulysses' Castle are of great extent, and j)ortions
still remaining near the summit are well preserved, some
fragments being nearly twenty feet high. It must have been
the work of a powerful tribe and a great stronghold. Seen
from the sea, it shows on a sharp conical rock precipitously
trending down to the shore. The Odyssey in no manner
makes allusion to this, either as city or as ruin. Ulysses passes
very near it going south, leaving it on the right, apparently
ignoring its existence. This makes it toleral)ly clear that it
had been so long in ruin that it was in no way to be connected
with the Odyssean dynasty or colonization even, or that it was
constructed after the Homeric epoch. The latter hypothesis
is untenable, because we find in many parts, especially in the
Argolid, ruins clearly contemporary with this, which are in
the Hellenic traditions regarded as the work of a vanished
and semi-divine race of giants, the Cyclopes or the " divine
Pelasgi ; " while, of the Homeric epoch, as distinguished from
the Pelasgic, which preceded it, and the Hellenic, which
followed it, we have no recognizable remains, and the cities
known to have existed, such as the Ithaca of Ulysses, have left
no ruin durable enough to show in our time. This indicates
a state of civilization in Avhich the great necessity of strong

32 ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

walls as a defense had passed, or that, by the use of cement,
walls were made so light in structure that they were efficient
for the day, but perished utterly in the intervening time,
which again is an untenable hyj^othesis, because we find
cement used nowhere in Greece in work known to be earlier
than the third century B. c. I leave the question of the
identity of the Odyssean epoch with that of the composition
of the poem at present untouched. I am dealing only with
the poem which philologists suppose to have been composed
about 850 b. c. That the author knew Ithaca perfectly, 1
think Ave shall see, and that consequently the ruins of the
Pelasgic epoch, when not continuously inhabited (as were
Nericus and Same, the former of which Laertes conquered,
and the latter of Avhich sent the largest deputation of " kings "
as suitors for Penelope, the foundations of both being Pelas-
gic), Avere already so lost in the tAvilight of prehistory as to
be Avithout any meaning to the author of the Odyssey. The
city Avhose ruins are noAV called the Castle of Ulysses was
as unknoAvn to the epoch of Homer as to ours. No one in
the AA^hole action of the Odyssey goes in or out of its gates, or
turns aside from his path to s^Deak of or visit it. " Kings "
were as common as rascals in those days, but that tAvo im-
portant cities should exist contemporaneously in the small
island of Ithaca, and that the people of Ulysses should live
in one, joasture their hogs on the territory of the other, and
ignore its existence, is impossible. This does not prevent
Schliemann from identifying the house Avails, AA^hich remain to
a small height, Avith the pig-jiens of Eumjeus, or a huge stump
near the citadel, Avith the tree from Avhicli Ulysses had made
his bed {Ithaca., Peloponnesus and Troi/).

That this part of the island Avas nearly or quite unpopu-
lated is made more than probable by the facts that no mention
is made of any city or people here ; that the only features
mentioned are the Avildness, and forests abandoned to feed-

ON THE TRACK OF ULTSSE,^. 33

ing of pigs ; and that Ulysses selects this part for his conceal-
ment. The path Ulysses probably followed from the 2:)ort of
Phorcys to the Raven's Cliff is by far too hard for dilettante
following ; it is not only impassable to beasts of burden, but, I
should say, difficult for a pedestrian. There is a road carriage-
able for a few miles from Yathy along the ridge southward,
and then a fair bridle-path to the cliff, Avhich, had Ave known
it, would have led us somewhere near the location of Eu-
mseus's sties ; but the guide my friends had recommended me,
on his personal assurance, did not know the road, and we
Avent Avandering across fields and over hills, abandoning our
quadrupeds at the moment Avhen they Avould have been our
best guides ; and, finally, the felloAv had to go to a ploughman
scratching the earth Avith a crooked stick behind a yoke of
year-old heifers, and inquire his Avay. I exhausted my modern
Greek in exasperated Adtuperation of his pretentious igno-
rance, and took the lead, as I generally have had to do on
similar occasions.

There Avas a pretty little valley on our Avay, the only arable
or fruitful land in this part of the island ; all else Avas bare
and bleak. A fcAV tough-lived shrubs, broom and gorse,
arbutus, and some others I did not knoAV, Avring a scanty
subsistence from the clefts bctAveen the rocks, and in a mass
of almost unmitigated limestone Avas cloven a ravine. The
roughness of Ithaca Avas proverbial even in Homeric days,
since Athena, Avhile disguised as a shepherd, replies to Ulysses,
" If it [Ithaca] is rocky, if it breeds not horses in its moderate
space, it is not quite barren," etc. One might Avell select this
scene as one of tranquil beauty, Avitli the faint glimpses of the
dreamy inner sea above its valley distance, and the golden
grain-fields as I saAv them, interspersed Avith vineyards and
olive-orchards.

The glen of the Raven's Cliff becomes a Avild gorge beloAV
the fountain of Arethusa, and descends abruptly to the sea.

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

Above,
that in

a stripe of bare, pale-gray rock doAvn the cliff shows
winter it is the location of a cataract, though, Avhen I

visited the locality, dry
as summer dust. The
fountain of Arethusa is
situated about half-way
from the cliff to the sea,
and bears the evidences
of an immense antiquity.
Iicmains of an architec-
tural surrounding a r e
still to be seen, which,
with some foundations
of walls of the Roman
IDcriod, evidently of a
temple to the nymph
or local goddess, and
" Ulysses' Castle," are

RAVEN'S CLIFF AND THE FOUNTAIN OF ARETHUSA.

the only traces of ruin discoverable in this lobe of the island.
The recess of the fountain has once been much larger, but

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 35

the slow jDrocess of depositing the ealeareous incrustation
which forms its walls has gone on so long that only a small
deep hasin remains, from which the people draw the water
with a cord and bucket. Its niche is cushioned Avith moss
and maidenhair ferns, and the soft jDorous rock is always
moist with the filtering through of the water. A wooden
trough is placed for the watering of the sheep and goats
Avliich take the place of the hogs of Eumseus, for this is the
only perennial source of water in the region.

An old woman, wrinkled and bowed, looking like one of the
Fates, sat near the fountain, combing the wool she had washed
at it ; and on the opposite side the nymph of the fountain, in
the shape of a young matron of some neighboring h;unlet, was
washing her clothes. The wash Avas boiling when we came
up, over a fire of brambles and weeds ; but the utensil which
took the place of the bronze caldron of the antique house-
mother was an American petroleum-can, ^\ii\\ a wire bale
fitted in rudely, and the st;unp of the Ncav York Refining
ComiJany was still visible on the tin. We talk of the omni-
presence of gold, of the omnipotence of cotton ; l)ut in my
wanderings on the earth I liaA c found places Avliere the joeople
did not know the value of a piece of gold, and ^\OYc nothing
but the homespun and woven wool of their flocks and flax
of their fields, while I have never found one that did not
know petroleum ; and I have learned that the petroleum-can
is a more universal concomitant of civilization than English
cutlery or American drillings.

The j)ens of Ulysses' pig-herd were at the top of the cliff",
where a plain of small extent and soil of scanty depth still
maintains an olive-grove, sole rejDrescntativc of the forest of
oaks whose acorns fattened the swine for the revels of the
suitors of Penelope.

Here Ulysses finds Eumteus, and here, in his anxiety to
convince him of the truth of his j^i'ediction of the return of

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

the ^vandcrer, he says : "If he return not as I dechire, let
your servants seize me and throw me over the high rock, that
vagabonds may learn in future to abstain from useless false-
hoods."

To return to the city of Ithaca, Ulysses must retrace his
stcj^s jiast the jjort of Phorcys, and follow the ridge of rock
^vliich connects the
diAisions of the is-
land past the mass
of Neriton. His

landing-jjlace was on the
east side of the island, the
port of the ancient cit}
Ithaca on the west ; and there are now on the road between,
several villages, the representatives, perhaps, of the ancient
towns from which Ulj'sscs drcAV his quota of men for the
Trojan campaign, " Crocyles and the rocky ^gilipos." It
was in one of these villages that Schliemann, visiting the
island for the first time, in his Homeric enthusiasm, as the
villagers, in their habitual curiosity to see the stranger, came
out to gaze and question, taking the assemblage as a demon-

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. ?j1

stration in his honor, und determined to shoAV them how well
he estimated the dignity of an heir of the Odyssean glory,
mounted on a table and translated from Homer the passages
whieh record Laertes' emotions on the return of his long-lost
son. " They wept with emotion," says the nai'f Doctor ; and
he rewarded them by some hundred lines more. Remember-
ing this incident, I inquired about the matter, and found that
it had excited much merriment in the cultivated circles of
Vathy, and, as I expected, the other side in the rencontre pre-
served a very different recollection of the Doctor's achieve-
ment, and that the tears were of merriment rather than of
pathos. No one in the assemblage could understand a word
of the Greek in the Doctor's pronunciation of it.

In the nomenclature of the two princii:)al higher villages of
the northern section, I found a curious survival of archaic
language, which, so far as I could learn, is as incomprehensible
as Homer, in the original, to the inhabitants. The \illages
are Anoi and Exo'i, Avhich are clearly from the archaic and
(except in the Cretan mountains) obsolete words aiio and era,
used as Iudv and c/ee are by us in driving oxen, and of course
meaning originally right and left, and these indicate site sur-
vivals of early towns or villages. But of Ithaca the ciJi/, the
home of Ulysses, not a trace remains except the name Palis
(city, the city jjar excellence), A^hich is applied to a locality
where not even an ancient Avail shows a claim to the appella-
tion. The fragments of substructure shoA\'n on the hill above
and near the village of Stavros are undoubtedly mediaeval, and
belong to the piratical city Avhich Avas established here, and
Avhicli Avas destroyed in the latter part of the sixteenth cen-
tury. I searched in vain for anything to indicate the date of
the ancient city, but here, doubtless, Avas the home of Ulysses.
Its little 25ort is of the nature demanded by ancient mariners,
— a smooth beach in a coac, Avith the island of Cephalonia
op250site and near enough to shut off an}- great violence of sea

38 ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

or wind. Homer relates that the suitors, when Teleniachus
had gone to Pylos to get neAvs of his father, sent out a ship
with some of their number to intercei^t and kill him on his
return, and that this ship lay in watch at an island off the
port where the return of Telemaehus's ship could be seen
from afar and preyented. Opposite Port Polis is a rock, prob-
ably the remnant of that island ; for, as the material of it is a
conglomerate easily subdued by the elements and decomposing
rapidly, it must have been once a considerable island, and it is
noAV the only remnant of rock or island which occu2:)ies any
such relative position.

In searching around the neighborhood for traces of antiquity
I was accosted by a peasant, who told me that there had been
found a stone with some letters on it, and I made haste to
hunt it out. They (for there were two fragments) were at
the bottom of a heap of stone which had been exhumed from
under a land-fall, and which were evidently part of a very
ancient building. I hired the men Avho gathered round to
remove the heap, and photographed the stones, which had
been originally one. The inscription is in the early style of
Greek epigraphy, boustrophcdon, /'. e., going alternately from
left to right and right to left, as oxen go when ploughing. It
is the oldest knoAvn inscription in the Ithacan alphabet.

I placed a coj)y of the photograph in the hands of Professor
Comparetti of Florence, amongst others, and received from
him the following, read at a meeting of the Academy of the
Lincei : —

" Since I have hitherto spoken of inscriptions very old or
archaic, as we say, it will be permitted me to close this com-
munication by presenting to the Academy a curious inscrip-
tion of this kind recently discovered in Ithaca and communi-
cated to me l)y a diligent and cultivated visitor to the Greek
lands, the American, Mr. Stillman, who made in Ithaca a pho-
tograjjli of the inscription, and, having unsuccessfully asked an

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

interiiretation of several scholars, applied to me. He has
jDerniitted me to make communication to this Academ}', put-
ting at my disjDosition also the negatiAC of his j^hotograph,
from which are 2)rinted the copies I present. The inscri2)tion is
tolerably roughly cut in a friable stone, broken in two, -worn
by time and water. The photograph, which is never the best
means of representing monuments of this kind even in expe-
rienced hands, presents some confusion and obscurity in parts ;

but this is the only difficulty in the epigraph.

I saw at

ixscr.ir'TiON found at polis.

once that this was an inscription of Avhich there was already
some notice in a book published by the PlKxniix of discoverers
of antiquities, Schliemann, in 1SG8, ' Ithaca, Peloponnesos,
and Troy.' Rich as he is in
fancy, Schliemann is read\
to believe any story, and at
once convinced himself that
he had discovered the in-
scription of a very old sar-
cophagus, and found an hon-
est workman who helped
him to complete the idea, showing him the bones found in it
by him. And in his book, together a\ ith this and other news,
he communicated the inscription such as he read it. Of the
tAvo fragments, however, he only saw that at the right, and this
he read very badly, seeing letters A\'here none are, and imagin-
ing incredible forms of letters. KirchhofF in his ' Studien zur
Geschichtc des Griechischen Alphabets ' sought to ai^ply this
monument to his purposes, but could make nothing of it, and
it wotdd have been impossible to get anything from it. Now,
thanks to the intelligent care of Mr. Stillman, we have before
us the monument as it is ; he knew nothing of Schliemann ;
when he saAV the inscription, he saw that it Avas incomj^lete,
and seeking amongst the stones, found the other piece, and,
divining justly its relation, united them and took the photo-

40 ON THE TEACK OF ULYSSES.

graph >\liich no\v permits us to utilize whtit we may cull his
discovery.

" The epigraph is ccrtaiuly very old, besides being boustro-
phedon. This is slio\vn particularly l)y the forms of the si(/ma
and iota. It was cut roughly and by hands little used to such
Avork, without any care for symmetry in the disposition of the
letters or of the lines, nor for the uniformity of the letters.
Some letters are lost in the fracture, others by the Avearing of
the stone, and the entire inscription is mutilated in the lower
part.

" The reading, with the filling up, is as follows : —

Tag ['AjOdj'ag
rai (P)[i](as)
xa\^L T](d)$ 'Hp
ag Ta (f ) [i']rfa
Tcj[t]ep(5 ol
<f[p]ee[5] (Kes-

" Translation : ' Of Athena — of Rhea — and of Hera — the
sacred utensils of the temple — the priests, Kes — placed.'

" Probably the names of the three priests followed, the first
commencing with the letters Kes, — perhaps Kesiphron, —
and there ought to follow rdh' htOsv or rarV xdrEBer, or similar
expression. The inscription, then, has nothing to do with a
sarcophagus, or Avith the dead. It treats, on the contrary, of
a hidden treasure, that is to say, of the sacred utensils of ;i
temple in Avhich >vere worshiped the three divinities, Athena,
Rhea, and Hera, each one haAing her peculiar priest. It is
Avell knoAMi that there is nothing ncAV in this case of three
divinities Avorshiped in the same, temple. We knoAV that
Athena Avas especially reverenced in Ithaca, and are not sur-
prised to find her first in the list. Then to explain this in-
scription, it may l)e supposed that in some perilous time of
Avar, revolution, or other danger, these priests decided to put

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 41

in security the treasures of tlie temple and hid them in a safe
and secret place, leaving there this inscription, so that in any
case the nature and origin of the objects might be known.
Probably they cut the inscription themselves that no one else
might be in the secret, and this would explain the signs of
haste and inexperience in the cutting, while on the other
hand the language, like the orthography, is correct."

The attribution to a sarcophagus by Schliemann is difficult
to explain as a mistake. If it had been, as he says, on a sar-
coj)hagus that he found the right half of the inscri^ition, he
must have found the whole ; l)ut the fact is that there Avas in
the whole pile of stones no fragment of anything like a sar-
cophagus, an object unknown in Greece till centuries later.
The inscription had evidently been a mural tablet and was
about eighteen inches deep and of a shape and size Avhich
made it impossible to take it for a fragment of a sarcophagus ;
and underneath the mass of debris from which it was ex-
tracted the workmen found a pit, Avhich was excavated, they
told me, without finding an)thing ; nor, they said, was any
object of antiquity found Avitli the stones, while Schliemann
engraves a lance head and a coin of about oOO B. c. which he
says were found in the sarcophagus. This j^roves nothing, for
when anything is found the absurd rigor of the Greek laws
makes the concealment of it the first object of the finder.
If this pit, Avhen discovered, had still contained the sacred ob-
jects, what a find if archteology could have profited by it !
But as the Greek law in case of concealment would have pun-
ished the excavator by confiscation, or in the best case by
taking the half of the objects found, the first precaution
taken by the finder would have been to remote, if possible, to
a foreign shore, and if not, to melt doAvn, if of precious metal,
the objects found. Until Greek legislation on archfeological
research is more intelligent, it Avill l)e gravely handicapped.
The greater part of the Aalue of an object is often to know

42 ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

where it came from, and this we never know of objects found
in Greece by chance or private excavation. There was some
years ago a report, which had certainly considerable confir-
mation, of the discovery of a great treasure in this very part
of Ithaca ; possibly it may have been this. If we could have
found the vessels of the temple, they would have given us the
art of the descendants of the Dorians in Ithaca at least six
hundred years b. c. ; for this inscription is Doric, and dates
from about that time.

In any case, we may be confident that our inscription marks
the site as having been in the vicinity of a city of, or little
later than, the Homeric epoch, as, supposing the Odyssey to
have been composed in 850 b. c, only about two hundred and
fifty years could have intervened between its comj)osition and
the placing of this inscrijition ; and we know of no ethnic revo-
lution which would have destroyed the Homeric city between
the Dorian invasion and the wars of Corinth.

But if there are no traces of the Homeric city, and none of
earlier construction in the immediate neighborhood of the
site, there is in the interior of the island, and in the northern
lobe, which we sec was probably the special domain of the
Ithaca of Ulysses, a most interesting antiqviity which is now
known as the " school of Homer." It is in all probability a
sacred place of the Pelasgic epoch, as on the rock above it is
a chapel whose substructions are clearly Pelasgic and most
probably the remains of a Pelasgic temple, which alone would
account for its preservation, and is probably also the reason of
its conversion into a Christian church. It is on a scale in
keeping with all the remains we have of the heroic epoch,
about twelve by twenty feet, and though much repaired in
the modern adaptation, still shows its ancient dimensions and
style of building in the loAver courses, too solid to have been
rearranged, though some of the upper stones have evidently
been replaced in later times. It stands on the brow of a low

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

bluff, below the village of Exoi and not for from the " field of
Laertes," which tradition points out at a little hamlet below.
Traces of other walls extend to the brink of the precipice

? 1^ ^ n'fll

I ''11

THE bCHOOL OF HOMFP

that o^eihanos the
" school," and round by the
side is an antique flight of
stej^s, mostly preserved and
cut in the solid rock, that
served as passage between the
temple and the " school,"
which may have been the
j)lace of sacrifice or possibly an area for the holding of the
council. It is mainly cut in the rock at the foot of the preci-
pice on Avhich the temple was built, with a double flight of
steps, also cut in the rock, descending to the ground below.

wl^,>.

44 o:^ THE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

It is not above fifteen feet across at its -widest, and the decom-
position of the solid rock by time and weather leaves only the
general shape and character, with some of the stej)s above and
below it, still toleral)ly perfect. It was a lovely place, and if
the shade noAv tliroA\ n by the olive-trees which surronnd it
was anciently given by plane-trees, it would have been still
more striking. You look off on the sea and the distant island
of Levkadi with the mountains of Acarnania, and through the
interstices of the olive-trees you catch glimpses of the culti-
vated valley beneath, where, if anywhere in this end of the
island, old Laertes must haA e had his field, as here only is til-
lage possible. North is the sea, south the huge wall of Neri-
ton, east the rugged mountain that looks out on the inner sea,
and Avest that on which Exoi is raised to the clouds and from
which one looks down on the Cephalonian channel at its foot.
Like the plain or valley between the Raven's Cliff and Vathy
for the southern lobe, this is the only valley for the northern.
The " school " is poised thus midway between the valley and
the mountain peak ; and whether, as the islanders pretend,
it was the place where Homer read his poems, the coun-
cil j)lace of the ancient heroes and kings, or the hieron of
Pelasgic priests whence the smoke of sacrifice went up to the
great Zeus, the choice of locality was one which suited alike
its uses. The young Avheat was springing into head in all the
interspaces of the close-standing olive-trees, and the rocks
above were overhung and draped Avith Avild sage and gemmed
Avith Avild floAvers. The boy Avho guided us assured us that
there Avas a secret passage to the top of the rock, filled up
noAV ; and a peasant passing by stopped to see aa hat Ave might
be saA'ing or doing, and finding that our interest Avas fixed on
palai.a pragiiiala, offered to guide us to an ancient rock-cut
Avell in the valley beloAV. We found the door Avhicli opens to
the passage, Avhich led down a stone-cut staircase to the Avell,
far in the ground ; but as the Avell belonged to the priest,

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSE.^. 45

who had the key in his pocket, and Avas, no one knew where,
we had to be content with the door, A^'hicl^ A\'as modern
enough, though fitting an opening cut in the rociv Aery evi-
dently ancient.

In this vicinity must, by the force of nature, liave been tlie
residence of all the agricultural part of the jiopulation of the
ancient Ithaca. Says the poem : —

" Ulysses and his companions withdrew from the city and
soon arrived at the magnificent garden of Laertes, which the
hero had formerly purchased with his Avealth alter the many
ills he had suffered. There stands his dAvelling, surrounded
on all sides by a portico Avhere the slaves A\iio cultivate his
estate sleci^ and eat. In the porter's lodge is an old Sicilian,^
who in this solitary place, far from the city, takes care of the
noble old man. . . . i\_t these A\ords he <>i\"es his arms to the
herdsmen who enter into the house of their master, Avhile
Ul}'sses, to find Laertes, enters into the garden. The hero
goes doAvn into the great Aineyard and finds neither Delias
nor his sons, nor the other slaves. Delias has led them far
aAvay to gather thorns to make hedges round the inelosure.
Ulysses finds his father digging round the root of a tree in
the garden. Laertes is dressed in a dirty patched tunic ;
around his legs he has bound, to preserve them, grea\es of
scAvn leather ; gloves protect his hands, and his head is
covered by a cap of goat-skin, Avhicli completes his mourn-
ful appearance. . . .

" ' Ah,' replied Laertes, ' if you are Ulysses, if you are my
son returned to this island, describe to me a sure sign that I
cannot mistake.'

" ' See first,' replies Ulysses, ' this Avound, Avhich long ago
on Parnassus a Avild boar gave me Avith his tusk, Avhen I Avent

^ I suspect the word which I have trans- when dealing with the liero's adventures

lated vSicilian to be a mistake in transcrib- there. It is however possible that he knew

ing, for Homer evidently knew nothing of the island liy name l^ut liad not identified

Sicily or he would have given it its name it with Ulysses' Cyclops-laud.

46 ON THE' TRACK OF ULYSSES.

to Autolycus to bring the presents wliieli he here had prom-
ised me. Then listen, I will deseribe to you the trees of your
beautiful garden which you gave me, and I asked of you in
my childhood as I ran l)ehind you. We passed through your
inclosure ; you told me the name of every tree, and you gave
me thirteen pear-trees, ten apple-trees, forty fig-trees, and
then } ou promised to give me fift} ro^vs of ^ines in full bear-
ing.' "

The legends of the modern population of Ithaca must not
be confounded with real local tradition, transmitted from an-
cient times. They are unquestionably the reflection of liter-
ary statement, the reiterated conclusions of students more or
less well informed as to the true archaeological bases of opin-
ion. The attribution of the particular spot we visited as the
garden of Laertes is doubtless due to reading of the Odyssey,
and, like the location of the " Castle of Ulysses " on Aetos,
arose from a popular rendering of the story as handed doAvn
by literature and con-\'erted into legend, Avhich is located
wherever the crude antiquarianism of the i:)eo25le judges best.
An instance of the real tradition which has a distinct value
in archaeological research is that of the j^reservation of the
name Polls for the abandoned site >A'liere unquestionably the
Homeric city stood ; and this simple indication is sufficient
to prove that Ithaca was never entirely depopulated and re-
peopled by Shns, because in this case the continuity of tra-
dition AAOuld ha^e been lost, and there is no ruin to restore
it in modern times, ca en if it were cai:)able of surviving the
interru^Dtion. If it had simply been handed down by a Sla-
vonic colony, it would have been " Arad " instead of " Polls,"
while, if the depopulation had once been complete, names
which are not now understood by the j^resent inhabitants
could not have originated with them. If the name had
sprung from the presence of ruins, the site on Aetos would
have received it instead of its jiresent legendary appellation, so

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 47

that in no way can we explain the surviyal of the name Polis
for the site, or the names Ano'i and Exoi, except hj supposing
them to have clung to the places from Homeric times through
a continuous population of Hellenic stock, however thinned.
Another curious incident illustrates the tenacity of this kind
of survival. As we were passing through one of the Aillages,
I heard one child calling to others to run to see the barbari-
ans, 01 [idppapoi (^vdrvan), just as the Greek chilch-en of an-
cient times would have called us, — ^. e., foreigners, j^eople
who spoke a strange language, a babble, unintelligible sounds
like those of children. I heard it twice and could not be
mistaken, though a Greek friend to whom I related it would
have it that they said i^avdpoi (Bavarians), since in continental
Greece, Bavarian (German) has been a term of contempt from
the days of King Otho. But I am certain of the word ; and
besides, the children of Ithaca never had anything to do ^\iih.
the Bavarians, as they were under the Ionian Government
till after the fall of Otho and the departure of the Bava-
rians.

On the whole, I think that there is the strongest ground
of probability for these conclusions : that, whatever may be
the relation of the real Ulysses to Ithaca, the hero as con-
ceived and represented in the Odyssey, the Ulysses of the
Homeric j^oems, if Ite was an adualitij, lived at the site known
as Polis ; and that this site, and all the others mentioned in
the poem, were known by the author of it from personal in-
spection. The inscription found at Polis is in Doric Greek,
which gives us a right to conclude that the city continued to
be inhabited by the mixed population, result of the Dorian
immigration ; while the entire oversight of the Pelasgic site
on Aetos indicates the total interruption of race connection
and the immense internal which must have come between its
construction and the transfer of the seat of power to Polis,
as, if still habitable when the new race took possession, it

48 ON TEE TRACK OF ULYSSES.

would, like Nericus, Same, and Crane, which we shall exam-
ine in Cephalonia, have been made the basis of the newer city.
That it was then utterly abandoned, we conclude, not only
from the neglect of it by Ulysses in the j^assages we have no-
ticed, but from the fact that while Same, on the other island,
sends suitors, and Ithaca itself (the city) adds its quota, no al-
lusion is made to any from any other j^lace in the island. In
short, the total silence through the whole poem in regard to
any place which can be by possibility connected with Aetos,
justifies my concluding that it was as much an abandoned ruin
m the time of Homer as now.

The episode of the voyage of Telemachus to Pjios and
Sparta, Avhich brings into the Od}'ssey the western shore of
the Peloponnesus, is, Avith the exception of some unimpor-
tant allusions, the only interjection of continental Greece into
the poem.

We went over to look for some trace of the sage Nestor,
but as usual found that while the people had enough of the
after-growth of legend out of the Odyssey, they knew abso-
lutely nothing of the antique site. I had no guide then to
lead me to the Pylos where the ship of Telemachus found
" the Pyleans scattered along the shore offering a sacrifice to
Neptune, black bulls without a spot."

The l)ay of Navarino is a vast marine lake, known to us
mainly by its being the locality of the decisiye combat be-
tAveen the fleets of the great European poAvers and the Turk-
ish and EgyjDtian, Avhich decided the destiny of modern
Greece. We ran in from the open Adriatic, Avhose AA'aters
were uncomfortably agitated by the south-Avest Avind, glad of
the safe and convenient anchorage. But a sleepier place than
the modern substitute for the " sandy Pylos " I have never
found in Greece. Nobody could giA e me a Avord of direction,
and all our searching round the extended sheet of Avater for
the antique site, only perhaps to be recognized by some half-

ON THE TRACK OF ULYSSES. 49

hidden remnant of Pelasgian walls, was fruitless ; we neither
saw nor heard of any ruin. We paid a visit to the splendidly
picturesque old Venetian fortress commanding the entrance
of the hay, which perhaps has used up the stones of Nestor's
Pylos, and which has looked down on one of the most mur-
derous comhats of modern naval history. It is garrisoned by
a little guard of Greek soldiers, and its keep is the prison of
the district. The gate is a good sample of the fortifications
by which the Venetian Republic held her Eastern posses-
sions.

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

The mythical world which had for its centre Ithaca, and
for its chief jieople Penelope and Ulysses, was out of all pro-
portion larger than the Euroj)e of to-day ; for it comprised
the whole knoAvn ^vorld, from the shadows of Cimmeria to
the clouds that gave birth to the Nile. Its geography, how-
ever, has a value to archaeology and prehistory which has not
been fully recognized. The date and place of origin of the
Odyssey will never be determined with any high degree of
certainty, but in dealing Avith epochs that comprise unmeas-
ured centuries Ave need not fear a variation of tAvo or three.
And the collation of traditions from the same mythical Avorld
Avill lielj) us to this approximation to the probable date of
Homer's life, if not that of Ulysses.

Gladstone, in the " Juventus Mundi," has made use of an
argument Avhich, even if not sound as to the Trojan Avar, I
believe to be good for the Odyssey. The earliest authentic
records in Greek history reveal Greece as under the control
of tAvo races, the lonians and the Dorians, elements AAdiose
antagonisms have been the chief cause of the disasters and
ruin of Greece.

But neither Dorians nor lonians Avere the dominant race
Avhen the Odyssey Avas Avritten, as neither lonians nor Dorians
apjiear in the record. The Greeks of the Trojan Avar are
ahvays called Achaioi, and the Dorians Avere evidently, as a
dominant race, unknoAvn to the author of the Homeric
2:)oems. Noav, as they came into Greece about 1000 b. c,
and as our researches shoAV the island of Ithaca, Avith Avhich

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND QEOdBAPUY. 51

Homer was well acquainted, to have become Dorian aa ith the
rest of Greece, the substance of the Odyssey must have been
earlier than we have supposed, and could hardly have been as
late as 850 b. c, unless the Dorian so-called invasion was an
immigration sjireading very slowly from the main line of its
movement, and its stock still a recognizably new people. Nor
does any possible modification of the Homeric jDoenis in the
recitals, continued over centuries, affect this argument in the
least, as, being common property of all the bards and all the
tribes, they were liable to be modified in the various versions
according to the localities and local knowledge of the singers ;
and, one *' rhapsody " being preserved by one tribe and an-
other by another, of this hardly homogeneous people, the
traces of the modifications received in their migrations could
not be by the philology of the date of their collation so ef-
faced as to lea\ e no marks of their incomplete restoration.

It is impossible that any idea of archaeological consistency
had led to the exclusion of the Dorians from the Odyssey.
If the Dorians had been ruling in Greece A\'hen it was com-
l^osed, it seems to the last degree improbable that they could
have been so completely ignored, if it were but for the defer-
ence to be paid the rulers of half the Greek world ; and
whether we look at the invariable practice of all early poets
to adapt their work to their own times and surroundings, or
to the entire consistency of the A\'ork in this respect, — too
complete to be due to the study of utterl)' unscientific or
illiterate later times, — I think it is to be admitted as proba-
ble that the Odyssey was composed before the great ethnical
revolution in Greece was complete.

The purely local evidence suj^ports this hypothesis to a cer-
tain extent, and in this tojjography and geography I propose
to wander as far as it is possible to do so with advantage to
our knoAvledge of the Odyssean world. Corfu was inhabited
by a race alien to the Greek, and which recognized its de-

52 THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

scent from the Siculi displaced by the Pehisgi from Sicily.
Opposite Ithaca lies the more important island of Ccphalonia,
to which Ithaca is now completely subordinate, but which
then was less important apparently than Ithaca, in all proba-
bility only because it was only partly Hellenic. Now, the
earliest classical name of this Island, KephaUenia, was derived
from Cephalus, a mythical hero who appears to have been
contemporary Avitli Minos. But this name is never ap2:)lied to
it in the Odyssey. Of the island nothing -is said, but of the
chief city, Samos (a colony from which gave its name to the
Asiatic island now known under that appellation), Homer has
much to say. It lies clearly in sight from Ithaca, from which
it is separated only by a narrow strait, and is one of the
prominent objects in the view from Ithaca. It Avas originally
one of that line of prehistoric cities whose only record is in
the stones of their walls, and from these we learn that it was
a very ancient coast settlement, which, unlike the city on
Aetos, survived through successive ciAilizations until history
got hold of it. In Ulysses' day it must have been a rich
place, for it furnished twentj-four pretendants to the hand of
Penelope. " There are first fifty-two young' men, the chosen
of Dulichios — six servants accompany them ; twenty - four
have come from Samos ; twenty from Zakynthos [Zante] ; and
from Ithaca were twelve, the bravest." But the author of
the Odyssey seems to have had no personal knowledge of
the topography of Ccphalonia, and mentions no other locality
in the island. Tradition tells us that the island was peopled
by Teleboeans, a peo2:)le driven from the continent by Achilles,
— before the siege of Troy, therefore, but subsequent to
Cephalus ; but this is one of the confusions of mythology, as
Cephalus found the Teleboeans in the island. The usual con-
densation of history into myth leaves very little clear in these
early traditions. Races become personified in individuals,
and the work of centuries is attributed to a life-time and an

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND QEOGUAPHY. 53

individual. Whether Cephalus was in reality a race or a man
it is impossible to do more than conjecture, but though the
poems mention the Kephallenes, the entire ignoring of its to-
pography and traditions, even of the ^isit of the Argonauts
to it, makes it difficult to believe that it Avas chiefly inhabited
by a race kindred to that of Ithaca when Homer knew it, be-
cause Homer was too much disposed to make use of the an-
tique traditions when ajDposite, to have left unnoticed that of
Jason at Pal^.

Cephalus having, according to the legend, killed his wife
Procris, mistaking her for a wild animal as she, excited to
jealousy by his devotion to the chase, which she attributed to
another love, hid herself in the thickets to watch him, was ban-
ished from Athens, and, wanderihg in exile, came to Thebes,
just then under excitement owing to the Teleboeans of Ceph-
alonia having killed the brothers of Alcmena, wife of the
Theban Amphytrion, and he was requested to take charge of
the expedition to avenge the murder. He succeeded in con-
quering the island and gave it his name. His descendants
reigned there two generations, after which, the latest rulers
of his blood being recalled to Attica by the oracle, a federa-
tive republic succeeded, formed by the four principal cities,
or perhaps by the four which had survived the changes of
race, for there are more than four antique sites. Those which
history has preserved as having submitted to the Romans in
the year of Rome 563 were Same, Nesia, Crane, and Pale.

The city of Same alone presents, in the annals of historical
times, any interest, and this is sad and glorious. Livy says
that at the end of the ^tolian war the Romans sent to Ceph-
alonia to know whether they would submit or try the fortune
of war, as they seem to have joined in the war with the JEto-
lians, though he gives no record of the part they took. He
gives the account, brief and tragic, of the fate of the city,
which I will neither dilute nor abbreviate : —

54 THE ODYSSET, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

" An iinhoj)ed-for peace had now shone on Cejohalonia
when one state, the Sameans, snddenly revolted, from some
motive not yet ascertained. They said that as their city was
commodiously situated they were afraid the Romans woukl
compel them to remove from it. But whether they con-
ceived this in their own minds and under the imjiulse of a
groundless fear disturbed the general quiet, or whether such
a project had been mentioned in conversation among the Ro-
mans and reported to them, nothing is ascertained exccj)t
that, having given hostages, they suddenly shut their gates,
and would not relinquish their design even for the j)rayers of
their friends whom the consul sent to the walls to try how
far they might be influenced by compassion for their parents
and countrymen. When no pacific answer was given, the
city began to be besieged.

" The consul had all the api^aratus, engines, and machines
which had been brovight from Ambracia, and the soldiers exe-
cuted with great diligence the works necessary to be made.
The rams were therefore brought forward in two places, and
began to batter the walls.

" The townsmen omitted nothing by which the works or
the motions of the besiegers could be obstructed. But they
resisted in two ways in particular, one of which was to raise
constantly opposite the part of the wall attacked a new '\^'all
of equal strength on the inside ; and the other was to make
sudden sallies at one time against the enemy's works, at an-
other against his advanced guard, and in those attacks they
generally got the better. The only plan that was invented to
confine them within the walls, though ineffectual, deserves
to be recorded. One hundred slingers were brought from
JEgium, PatnTB, and Dymae [Peloponnesus]. These men, ac-
cording to the customary practice of that nation, were exer-
cised from their childhood in throwing with a sling, into the
open sea, the round pebbles with which, mixed with sand, the

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGBAPHY. 55

shores were generally streAvn ; therefore they cast weapons of
that sort to a greater distance, with surer aim and more
powerful effect, than eyen the Balearian slingers. Besides,
their sling does not consist merely of a single strap like the
Balearic and that of other nations, but the thong of the sling-
is threefold and made firm hy scYcral seams, that the missile
may not, by the yielding of the strap in the act of thi-owing,
be let fly at random ; but, after sticking fast while "whirled
about, it may be discharged as if sent from the string of a
bow. Being accustomed to dri\e their missiles through cir-
cular marks of small circumference j^laced at a great dis-
tance, they not only hit the enemy's heads, but any jDart of
their faces that they aimed at. These slings checked the
Sameans from sallying either so frequently or so boldly ; inso-
much that they would sometimes from the walls beseech the
Acha3ans to retire for a aaIiIIc and be quiet spectators of their
fight with the Roman guards. Same supported a siege of
foiu' months. When some of their small number Avere daily
killed or wounded, and the sur\iA'ors were, through continual
fatigues, greatly reduced both in strength and sj^jirits, the Ro-
mans, one night, scaling the ^\•d\\ of the citadel which they
call CVatides (for the city, sloping toward the sea, verges to-
ward the Avest), made their Avay into the forum. The Same-
ans, on discoA'cring that a part of the city Avas taken, fled
Avitli their Avives and children into the greater citadel ; but,
submitting next day, they Avere all sold as slaA^es, their city
being 2)lundercd." (Bolin's translation.)

It is only by conjecture aa'C can distinguish betAvecn the tAvo
hills, Ixjtli being covered Avith ruins ; and the Avails are so
broken in their circuit, and so complex as avcII as various in
their ejDoch of construction, that no plan of the siege could
be made, but the above indicates the Avcsternmost as first
captured.

The city must have been very Avealthy, if Ave may judge

56 THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

from that generally excellent indication, the tombs, which
line the roads and the sea-shore beyond the city (looking from
the point where the general view is taken), and by the enu-
meration of the booty taken by the Romans, which is given
as follows : Tavo hundred golden croAvns of ten Roman pounds
each, eighty-three thousand pounds of silver, two hundred and
forty-three pounds of gold, one hundred and eighteen pieces
of Athenian money, tAvo thousand four hundred and twenty-
two of Macedonian, two hundred and eighty-three statues of
bronze, two hundred and thirty of marble, besides the money
distributed to the army.

I know of no place where the ruins of all epochs are so
well indicated as at Same. The large fragment of wall of the
best Hellenic time which runs down the sloj^e of the eastern
hill is one of the finest, if not the finest, I have ever seen.
Its stones are perfectly hewn, and some of them are twelve
to fourteen feet long, and the highest portion still standing is
not less than twenty feet high. At other points are various
examples of the Pelasgic, similar to that of " Ulysses' Castle,"
but of better work. There are magnificent subterranean
passages, one of which leads to the citadel on the easternmost
hill, the more remote in the distant view, but the higher and
probably the site of the greater citadel, being marked by the
most imposing ruins and remains of works, and without doubt
the locality of the original settlement. On the lower hill
stand some interesting remains — a tower and remains of city
wall of mixed Hellenic and Pelasgic, the tower being of the
very latest Hellenic, showing the beginning of " rustication."
It was built upon in the middle ages, and the whole mass of
buildings transformed into a fortress and afterward into a
convent. Same must very early have been a large and impor-
tant city, as the Avholc of the space, including the tAvo hills
and the land bctAveen them, shoAvs traces of Pelasgic con-
struction, and one fragment on the broAV of the hill near the

THE ODYSSET, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY. 57

tower is one of the most lierfect examjDles of the best Pehis-
gic work one can find away from Mykenaj and Argos. The
stones in the illustration range about five feet in length, and
are faced Avitli exquisite exactness. A wild fig-tree has taken
root in the interstices of the stones, and the roots have
pushed the masses of rock apart, but in several i:)laces it is
difficult to see the junction when the light is flat against
them. Of Roman work there is little ; but some thermae
walls on the plains by the sea and some tombs shoAV a con-
siderable Roman occupation. Livy says that Marcus Tullius,
the conqueror of Same, Avent over to the Peloj^onnesus " after
having placed a garrison in Same." This negatives the notion
that the walls were razed to the foundations, as is asserted by
La Croix ; and it is also rendered improbable by the existing
ruins, though it is not impossible that so much of the Avail
was destroyed as made the defense of it temporarily impracti-
cable. There are, however, some slight traces of rubble-Avall
on the old ruins, which sIioav a Roman (or possibly middle-
age, though I incline to the former) construction, Avhich nega-
tive any supposition that the enceinte Avas rendered useless for
defense ; for no one Avould repair a Avail Avhich Avas not tol-
erably complete in its circuit. The remains of the Roman
time, however, are insignificant compared Avith those of the
Pelasgic, either as to preservation or quality.

At present Same is an insignificant village, consisting of
tAventy or thirty small houses stretched along the beach, Avith
a tiny jDort formed by a breakAvater constructed from the
stones of the city Avail, the fairest and best cut that could
be found. The people are a thievish clan, Avho set on any
chance comer, like mosquitoes on a solitary and bcAvildered
fisherman in a SAvampy land. They have coins and antiquities
to sell, for Avhich, as everyAvhere else in Greece, they demand
the most absurd prices ; and they beset one Avith oflers of
service as guides, etc., etc., etc., till they Aveary all human

58 THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

patience. This may be said of the lonians in general, but
less of the people of Cerigo, perhaps, than the others. We
fovmd, however, a grateful exception. We had wandered
along the beach to the fur-
thermost houses of the line,
and on passing a \er\ re-
spcctable-lookuig house, the
o^^ner, sitting in tlie cool-
ness of the t\\iliglit at his
gates, seeing t\\o strangers,
rose to salute us and imited
us to enter ; an in\itation so

#*^^-»l

3<:®.le!nic

amiable and earnest tliat
-we accepted, and ^\ere
ushered into the guest-
liamber, clean and fur-
nished AA ith di\ ans in
eastern fashion, A^here "we
AN ere entertained an ith

the usual sweetmeats and coffee, while the daughter of the
house went into the garden and collected for each of us a
bouquet of roses, the most fragrant I ever remember to have

THE ODr^iSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY. 59

seen. Our host narrated many incidents of the English rule
in Cej^halonia, and when we rose to go urged us to take uj)
our quarters in his house ; and finally, as Ave stood before the
gates, as a last fiivor, offered me two beautiful Greek stelaj,
memorials of the ancient dead, j^ossibly of the period of the
heroic defense of Same. He had found them in digging his
house cellar, and they were the ornaments of his court-} ard ;
but learning that we were in search of antiquities, he ofiered
them freely as his contribution. I shall not soon forget him
or his fragrant roses and the dark-eyed Samcan girl Avho of-
fered them to us.

Of Crane scarcely a trace remains, even of the Pelasgic
walls. It stood originally on the Lake of Argostoli (to which
place we drove from Same across the island), but at a point
now far from the water's edge. The lake is a singular geolog-
ical phenomenon, formed b}' a number of s^^rings bursting out
from under the hills on Avhich Crane lav, Avith a force suffic-
ing to drive mills and form a strong current over the whole
extent of the lake, Avhich is a mile or more in diameter,
though the surface of land to be drained l)y these subter-
ranean outpours is, one Avould say, utterly inadequate to the
quantity of Avater deliAcred.

I took a guide at Argostoli, a man of the usual type of
Greek guide, Avho assured me that he kncAv the ancient city,
and had often guided strangers there. On arriving at the
head of the lake I found him taking useless detours to bring
me to the mills, Avhich Avcre driA'cn by the springs ; and on
asking him Avhat he Avent there for, he replied that he sup-
posed I Avanted to see the mills — since that Avas Avhat other
people had come for. I gave him an energetic sample of
modern Greek, and ordered him to shoAv me the Avay to the
ancient city — Palaiokastron. " Palaiokastron ! " he ejaculated
Avith surprise and beAvilderment in his eyes, and turned to ask
some shepherd boys or other vagabonds, Avho Avere sauntering

60 THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

near by and watcliing us, where the Pahdokastron was. They
declined to give any information, probably regarding him as
a poacher on their jireserves. I had, therefore, to depend on
my antiquarian instincts, and, taking the lead, climbed over
the heights above until, guided by the nature of the ground,
I found the traces of the old wall.

The position of the city Avas entirely characteristic of the
sites of the Pelasgic epoch : a bold, double peak, almost inac-
cessible on the sea-side, and on the two flanks still very pre-
cipitous, but connected with higher land on the side opposite
the water. On the side from which the view is taken none

CRANE FROM THE SEA SHORE.

of the ancient walls remain. The movement of earthquakes,
the gradual fall of the rock at the precipitous edge, or the
leveling labor of man has carried away all the blocks that
made this side of the enceinie ; but many of the stones may
bo recognized at the foot of the slope, some worked into
modern walls, and some in the ddbris of the hill. On the
opposite side the traces are more distinct, and the wall may
be traced a long Avay, and the site of the citadel determined,
with a gate and the angles of some of the towers. From
near the citadel a A'iew is obtained which shows a long line
of the debris with a distant view of the town of Argostoli and
the lake, and far bevond the lines that form the western shore

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY. Gl

of the superb harbor of Argostoli, ahnost Avithout a rival in
the Adriatic. The mass of Avail is hardly to be distinguished
from mere decomposed rock ; so much ha^e time and frost,
the great demolishers, split and crumbled the flinty, massive
limestone, the preferred material of the Pelasgi. On the fur-
ther shore shoAvn in the vieAV may be seen, Avhen the air is
clear, the houses Avhich form a modern village on the site of
the ancient Pale. Here Avere Jason and his felloAv adven-
turers entertained on their search after the golden fleece, —
an expedition Avhich 23erhai)s avc may translate from myth into
probability, as an expedition to obtain an improved breed of
sheep, a finer-Avooled stock, from one of the northern and in-
land countries.

At Argostoli I inquired about the ruins of Pale, but Avas
told that they are mainly built over, and Avhat is a isible is
only of the Roman period. I attempted, hoA\'evcr, on our
return to Same, to run around in the Kestrel, as the voyage
across the bay from Argostoli is neither pleasant nor sure in
the small boats that make the service. We got up anchor as
the land l)reeze began to bloAv at midnight, and I A^ent to
bed, having giAcn orders to anchor in a little bay about half-
way to the southern extremity of the island near Avhich some
ruins are indicated on the map. AAvaking in the morning
and finding a most suspicious tranquillity prevailing, I took a
look at the outside surroundings, and found the yacht quietly
moored on the same spot she had occupied the day before.
A furious sirocco had sj^rung up and met us half-Avay to our
destined anchorage, and after beating for an hour in vain, our
little boat nearly buried in the seas, avc Avere compelled to
retreat and run back to our former place of refuge. There is
no getting ahead in such small craft against the sharp, violent
seas of the Mediterranean.

Three days the sirocco blcAV, and avc tried in a ain to pass
the time fishing. The lonians have adopted dynamite so uni-

62 THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

versally to catch their fish that they are as scarce as honest
peojsle on shore. One does find them sometimes, and we
caught a shark about four feet long and a half dozen red mul-
let where, before dynamite was discoyered, we could have
caught in the same time a hundred-weight.

The third night we got under way again, and, with a heavy
swell still on, ran down to our harbor, reaching it as a flam-
ing, splendid thunder-storm was coming up, the finale of our
southern blow. We moored with cables out in three direc-
tions, and Avlien the storm had all gone by I Avent ashore to
hunt my ruins. A vagabond Cephalonian offered his services
to carr}' my camera and guide me ; but his crafty and evasive
fiice, coupled Avith the assurance with Avhich he clung to me,
so irritated me that to rid myself of him I jilunged into the
pathless thicket. Traveling by compass, and searching long
and closely, I found at last the remains of an early Pelasgic
Avail on a magnificent site, Avith a breezy outlook to sea north
and Avest and overlooking a fertile valley inland, not especially
pictorial, for it Avas too regular and too thoroughly cultivated,
but through it ran a bright crystal brook overhung by huge
pollard sycamores and fringed Avitli oleanders just bursting
into blossom and making the valley look like a rose-garden.
Beyond the hill on Avhich the city stood is a Avild ravine
through A\'hich runs the brook, Avhich in Greek Avould nat-
urally be dignified by the name of a river. Only a narroAV
neck, as usual, gave access to the site. It is impossible to
ascertain Avith an}' kind of assurance Avhat the name of the
city Avas. It could not have been Nesia, the only one of the
four principal ones Ave have not visited, for i\o ruins are visi-
ble approaching so late an epoch as the Roman, and it Avas
probably Heraclea. Its position Avas magnificent for defense
and on account of the fertility of the country behind it, but
the site Avas probably abandoned very early for one further
inland, Avhere I Avas assured there Avere ruins of an ancient

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGBAPIIY. 63

city. But my time had been so invaded by the loss of three
days through the storm, and I was already so behind my j^ro-
gramme, that I was not able to give the time necessary to the
search and examination, or, indeed, to follow my plan of visit-
ing Pale.

We climbed down to the brook, and I enjoyed the pastime
of wading in the gurgling Avater as if I were a boy — it -was
so long since I had had that pleasure ! We followed it into
a close and gloomy gorge, where the crag of the ancient site

DISTANT VIEW OF PALE FROM THE CITADEL OF CRANE.

overhung us like a huge, rough wall, almost a sheer precipice,
and down at the foot ran the brook, which we folloAved to the
sea. The sun was setting as we reached the yacht, and be-
fore we waked from sleep next morning we were bounding
toward Zante.

In Zante (Zakynthos) there is, so for as I could find, no
ancient ruin whatever. The character of the rock explains
this ; for, except at the extreme southern end of the island,

64 THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

there is no stone which woukl resist even the Aveather-wear
since the Ilonian epoch. The iskind seems to be a bed of
sand raised from the sea and sKghtly hardened, so that,
though the citadel hill is imposing enovigh as a mass, the ma-
terial of it is being continually dissolved, and looks at a dis-
tance more like a bank of clay than like rock.

Zante is rhymingly called the " fior di Levante " (flower of
the Levant), but it is difficult to see wherein it surpasses
Corfu in any flowery attribute. I guess that, as in many
other cases, the rhyme went for more than the fact, poetical
or otherwise. It is fertile, and the land extends in an im-

mense unpicturcsque plain covered with olive - orchards and
vineyards for miles from the port. Its history is unimportant
and its mythology not interesting. It was said to have been
colonized by Zakynthos, son of Dardanus of Troy, about 1500
years before Christ ; but, as I have before said, all Greek dates
and traditions of migration earlier than 1000 B. c. are purely
conjectural. Zante suffered Avith the other islands from the
endless and furious feuds of the Greek states ; ravaged by
turns by Athenian and Lacedaemonian, it came doAvn to the
Romans an unruly su1)ject province, conquered and recon-
quered, and flnally lay still in the tranquillity of slavery
until Gcneseric, king of the Vandals, began an epoch of dei^as-
tation, Avhich only concluded Avitli the purchase, by the Yene-

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY. i65

tians from the Sultan, of its soil depopulated l)y the sword
and slavery.

He who goes about in the Mediterranean has great chance
of seeing bad weather, for it is the reverse of a j^acific sea,
and in a scrap of a boat like the Kestrel the phenomena arc
sometimes interesting. Our course from Zante to Cerigo (an-
cient Cythera) leads by Cape Matapan, opposite Cape Malea,
the two southern points of Greece, Avhich enjoy a reiDutation
of the kind that the American proverb gives to Hatteras and
Lookout. The Kestrel was again baffled, and, after beating
for hours to get past the point, Ave had to put up the helm
and run back to Navarino, the nearest shelter, before a
gathering southerly blow. We lay in our old anchorage an-
other day, and as the Avind fell at night Ave beat out again and
ran through the little archijjelago of barren and desolate isl-
ands Avhich lie off this part of the Morea. The weather still
looked ugly, and thunder-clouds were gathering on the hills
of Lacednemon, and Ave could see the storm creeping doAvn to-
ward the sea, but the Avind Avas fair, and Ave hoped to make
Kapsali, in Cerigo, before the squall came doAvn. Already the
heights of Cerigo loomed before us, and avc had begun to look
for the landmarks, Avlien the Avind struck us. All hands made
what haste Avas possible to get in sail and get up a small storm
jib to lie to under, and not too quickly, for no common canvas
would have stood that blast Avhen it struck us. The sun Avas
setting, and soon avc Avere out of sight of all land in the driving
spray and rain. The lightning Avas such as only they Avho sail
in semi-tropical seas can have knoAvn, blinding and incessant ;
it seemed to have gathered around the mountains of Cerigo
as a centre, for it Avent and came and still hung there as the
rain SAvept doAvn the coast and up again. As the Avind fell off
with the doAvn-pouring of the torrents Ave got off again and
pointed our boAvsprit for Kai^sali ; and as the Avaters above
and those beloAV seemed to have formed an alliance aaainst

66 THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

us, we went below and shvit the hatch. Fortunately the wind
was off shore and we had little sea, and managed to creep
along nearly as much as we had drifted to the leeward ; so
that when the storm broke and the rain held up we were able
to see the rocks off the coast, and finally to groj^e our way
into the little port of Kapsali, which is secure against every-
thing but a southerly blow. The wind, always contrary, fell
off as we drew near the light-house, and we had to get in with
our sweejis in the small hours of the morning, wet, cold,
hungry, and jaded from the excitement of the night ; for,
thovigh it is simjDle and safe in the telling, a large Greek brig
foundered only two miles from us in the squall, and we had
experienced the worst weather we had yet felt, and since the
storm began no one had been able to eat or even get a cup of
coffee.

At Kapsali one begins to see the antique sailor ways and

the evidence of the intense conservatism of the eastern world.

The ships are drawn up on the beach at night as of old, and

this necessitates a construction of the hull Avhicli cannot be

ffir removed from that of the antique. Indeed, I have seen

fishing-boats which might have served for the models of the

galley on the Roman coins. The rigging, again, is of the

simplest, and fitted for these seas, where the sudden squalls

and the " nieltem," or gusts which come down from the

mountains with no warning but a little cloud appearing on

the summit, sometimes leave brief space for the taking in of

sail. On the whole, wherever we look we see ample evidence

that in the whole Levant, where the original population exists

in a considerable proportion, the ways of life and thought are

the same as those of Homer's day. Nature has changed more

than man. Where the Yenetians came they brought new

habits of military life and construction, and demolished all

the old ruins to make fortresses ; but on the domestic life and

on the character of the Greek they had little or no influence.

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY. 67
Whether Kapsali, a mere viUage, the port of Cerigo, had

13wr

' n'l

' ''^'i

any ancient existence, we do
not knoAv. Cerigo lies on the
high rock above it, and is a
Venetian fortress ; and, as is gen-
erally the case with Venetian
fortresses, has used up all an-
cient masonry, if any existed, in
its construction.

The road from Kapsali to
the town of Cerigo is of Ve-
netian construction, kept in
repair by those fitting succes-
sors of Venice, the English,
who certainly left the Ionian
," ' Islands in a state of prosperity

[ higher than that of to-day.
Good roads were almost eyery-
where provided, and good ways of other kinds, now lost en-
tirely, if I might believe the comj^laints of the people. The

68 THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

position of Ccrigo is yery strong for the days of Venetian
rule, and it overhangs the port and country round on every
side, except one, Hkc a Pehisgic site, but I could find no stone
of that date. It is not likely that there Avas any very ancient
city there, as no tombs or evidences of a necropolis have been
found. The formidable character of the position in the times
of the Yenetians is shoA^n by the vieAV from the road above
the ravine which severs the mountain from the lesser hill over
the port — a ravine whose existence is quite unsusiDCcted from
the port.

The city itself is without interest except as the first really
Eastern city one will see coming from the West, and as an
example of Yenetian fortress-building. The view from the
citadel is fine and breezy, the islands of Ovo, Cerigotto, and
Crete being visible, and a groat expanse of that sea which, on
sunny days, is in itself so beautiful from its color. You look
down on the houses, white as continual whitewashing will
make them, whose flat, terraced roofs serve in the hot and
rainless summer as sleeping-places for the whole family. Hoav
many nights I have dragged my mattress from the bedroom
out on this delightful substitute and let the night breeze fan
me to sleep !

Of history the island has next to one. Mythology j)uts
the landing of Aphrodite here, as she came, foam-born and
sea-borne, to found her religion in the Greek worlds.^ The
first who are traditionally re2:)orted to have colonized the
island are the Phoenicians ; but it is impossible to ignore the
previous coming of the Pelasgi, who have left a well-marked
ruin of the earliest type. To see the traces of the antique
settlements, one had better go to Port San Nicolo if provided

^ The confusion which is so common be- Aphrodite was the first-horn of Zeus, the

tween Ajihroclite, the Greek goddess, and creating Intelligence, and Dione the prolific

Astarte, the Phoenician, had its beginning Earth — Spirit and Matter — and Aphro-

at Cythera. It is only in later Greek my- dite was Divine Love ; — Astarte, lust,
thology that they are confounded. The true

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY. 69

as we Avere ; but secure an intelligent guide previously from
Cerigo, as the country j)eoi3le, as in other islands, A\hile jDre-
tending to know all about the antiquities, really know abso-
lutely nothingo They know the tombs because they serve as
sheep-folds, and they have sometimes a curious knowledge of
the relative antiquity of the ruins ; but they have heard mod-
ern myths, and apply them with the least possible regard to
archseological facts, and invariably assure you that they know
everything.

So it happened that I was again, for want of choice, out on
a search with an ignorant guide. There had been some ex-
cavations commenced on the site of Avhat is now known as
Palaioj^olis (the old city), which evidently was Plioenician,
and was occupied down to Roman times. There were some
columns of Roman or Byzantine work unearthed, and from
mere curiosity to knoAV his notions, I asked a shepherd boy
watching his sheej^ near by Avhat they Avere. " This," he
said, " Avas the palace of the king." "Of Avhat king?" I
asked. " Don't you knoAv ? " he said, opening his cacs at me
as if this Avere the very a h c of history. " Wh)', the palace
of Menelaus." There is an old tradition that it Avas the place
of residence of Menelaus and Helen, and all the objects to be
seen are attributed to them. The Phoenician city is close to
the sea ; the Pelasgic site is several miles back, and looms ujd
on the highest mountains in the vicinity. In a previous visit
I had seen but had not explored it ; but noAv I determined to
see the Avhole extent of it. My guide, Avho brought a donkey
for my occasional changes of mode of locomotion, pretended
to lead me to the ancient citadel ; but Avlien Ave reached the
hill on Avhich I kncAv it to be better than he, he began to in-
quire about it of the Avomeu at Avork in the fields ; thereupon
I, as usual, took the lead. Guided by the nature of the
ground, I found all that remained of the ancient citadel Avail
— a fragment kept up by the chance of its being the limit of

70 THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

a field, and so kept in rei)air, but in such a state of dilapida-
tion that but for the evidences of the continuity I would not
have been sure that it was a wall. I followed the main wall a
mile or more along the edge of the precipitous slope, and saw
that it bore testimony to the imjjortance of the ancient city,
for it was wide in its compass and massive, with towers, gates,
and flanking towers of the true Pelasgic style, but in most
l^laces only two or three stones high, I got an imjDosing vicAV
of the hill from below the lowest trace of wall, showing its
position with reference to the valley below, through which
ran once a river of some volume, if we may judge by the allu-
vial plains at its mouth, but which at the time of my visit in
midsummer, was dry as desert dust. A strij) of white pebbles
shows where it still runs in Avinter-time. On the hills close
to the sea-side, and on both sides of the mouth of this ancient
river, used to lie the old Phoenician, Greek, and Roman city,
whatever it was originally called, — probably Cythera, like
the island. As I have said, it is now called Palaiopolis. The
temple of Aphrodite, the people pretend, Avas on the hill near
the citadel Avhere uoav is an insignificant chapel, but Avith no
evidence of antiquity exceiDt that there are in the construc-
tion of the chapel some large stones Avhicli are evidently of
Hellenic cutting ; but as the Greeks had the habit in all ages
of keej^ing uj) the tcmjiles of their gods, there is nothing to
shoAv that it Avas a temple of Aphrodite rather than a Pelasgic
god, Avhich Aphrodite-Astarte Avas not, and her temi^le must
have been near the sea.

The site of Palaiopolis is marked by a quantity of tombs,
most, if not all, of Hellenic date. There are uoav no temple
remains there ; but Spon, Avho visited the spot tAvo hundred
years ago, says that he saiv the statue of Aphrodite, AA^hich
was very ugly and of coarse broAvn stone, Avhich reminds us
of the statues of Cyprus. The rock is a soft conglomerate
Avhich the sea cuts aAvay very rapidly, and apparently there

TEE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCE AND GEOGRAPEY. 71

has been a subsidence of the soil, since they say that when
the sea is tranquil there may be seen beneath the water, some
distance out from the actual shore, the ruins of a city. This
may have been the port of Cythera — scarcely a fortified city,
as the site must have been too low. Right and left of the
rivulet Avhich now represents the ancient river are bluffs of
conglomerate, that on the left honeycombed by tombs, some
of which have fallen with the rock, but of which others are
still visible, opened to the elements but showing within the
rock-cut graves. Many valuable articles of gold Avork have
been found in past times, but the treasure seems to have been
exhausted. These two bluffs are the lineal representatives
and successors by right of position of what Aphrodite must
have seen as she came ashore on the foam, otherwise they
have no interest.

The two low hills which were included in the city of Cy-
thera are covered with fragments of buildina,' and traces of
tombs, but, so far as I could find, no wall. This is all that
is left of Aphrodite, Helen, and Menelaus in their land of
fabled existence. The coming ashore of Aphrodite undoubt-
edly indicates, like that of Europa at Gortyna in Crete, the
landing of a colony from Phoenicia, bearing the Avorship of
Astarte, Avho became later assimilated to Aphrodite. Of the
presence here of Helen and Menelaus there is no evidence
in any trustworthy tradition. The subjection of Cythera to
Sparta is of historic date. My conclusion as to the island is
that in Homeric times it was Phoenician in its relations as
Melos Avas at one time, as Avell as Santorin and other eastern
islands, and that, like Corfu, it did not come into the Greek
system.

Opposite Cerigo, and Avith its snoAvy peaks glistening under
the noonday sun, lies Crete. The strangest omission of the
Odyssey Avould have been that of the island of Minos from
its reminiscences, if the author had knoAvn of it ; but, as Ave

72 THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

have seen in his interviews with Athene, Ulysses did not fail
to include it in his geography though he had apjiarently never
visited it, and like Egypt and Lotophagitis it was known by
report. Of Egypt Ave had heard mention through the visit of
Helen and Menclaus. Of the country where subsequently
was established the Great Greek-African colony, Gyrene, we
have no hint, yet the inhabitants of the Peloponnesus knew
of Libya earlier than the Dorian invasion — as early, in fact,
as 1500 B. c, as we knoAV by the Karnac inscriptions. The
story of Eumaius shows knowledge of the ways of that race of
merchants and pirates, the Phoenicians, but nothing of their
country.

The questions of the personality and date of Homer and of
the reality of the Trojan war are utterly diverse, and not, in
foct, interdependent. As to the latter we have thus far no
direct evidence whatever, beyond j^oetic traditions in which
the sujDcrnatural is so strongly and inextricably involved with
the pretense or actuality of history that no inferences can be
drawn from any part of the narrative, though from its ensem-
ble we are assured that in its ancient form it was accepted
as history by the entire Greek world as early as we knoAV any-
thing of that world with historical certainty. But that is no
criterion. Even at this day myths groAv and crystallize in the
Oriental mind with a rapidity Avhich leaves the ancients Avith-
out any advantage. The universal belief from the first to
the eighth century B. c. that the Iliad Avas history need not
Aveigh Avith us. Scientific investigators differ so Avidely that
Ave have no general inference to draAV from their arguments.
The most recent excavations leave a grave doubt Avhether
any of the ruins cxcaA ated in the Troad can by any reason-
ing be admitted to be as old as the Iliad, and the remains
on Ilissarlik hill Avhicli Schliemann more siio has identified
Avith Homer's Troy are clearly the remains of the city of
Croesus, being of brick, Avhicli does not appear in the classic

THE ODYSSEY, ITS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY. 73

traditions or structures until his time, and we know by au-
thentic history that he did build a city on this hill. Professor
Jebb, one of the most acute of the literary investigators of
the question, is convinced that the topograjihy of the Iliad is
eclectic, some of its indications suiting only Hissarlik and
others only Bunarbashi ; Max Miillcr maintains that the whole
story is a solar myth ; while Nicolaides, a j^atient and tho-
rough Greek student of the Iliad, believes that he can fol-

LANDING-PLACE OP THE CTPRIAX APHRODITE OR ASTARTE.

low the whole strategy of the poem on the plain of Troy.
But the main questions involved in the Odyssey are of a
different character and determined by different criteria. I
offer my suggestions as to some of them with the deference
due my masters in archaeology.

The general knowledge shown in the Odyssey divides itself
into kinds : that which was part of the general geography of
the day, and this included the coasts shown on our route
map ; and that of which the poet had personal cognizance,

74 THE ODYSSEY, FYS EPOCH AND GEOGRAPHY.

which is limited to Corfu, Ithaca, Ncriciis, and possibly Pylos ;
and this oxclusivcness suggests to us that Homer, a stranger in
the West, had come, as I did, simply to follow and study the
traces of Ulysses' wanderings, and that he did so in obedience
to a clearly preserved tradition as to his great exemplar, which
was almost impossible without the still remembered jjersonal
presence. What he describes is admirably told, even to the
" sandy shore " of Pylos, in a world whose sandy shores are
rare ; but Homer does not seem to have any mental vision of
the lands and islands of Avhich Ulysses only speaks in his story
— the lands of the Cimmerians, of the Laestrygonians, the
Cyclops, the Lotoiohagi, the homes of Circe and Calypso, are
only heard of. Cythera, close by, is not named, and Crete and
Egypt are only named. This kind of fulfillment, as well as
this kind of omission, gives a tone of personality to the poem,
as the comj^osition of one person, and that one familiar with
the scene of its major events, and it strengthens my belief in
the hypothesis of the presence of Homer in Ithaca, and of
the early date of the Odyssey, and by a certain implication
argues for a logical relation between the hero and the Trojan
war, implying the actuality of both.

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

In the year 1820, before the struffQie between the Hellenic
population of the Turkish emjiire and the Porte had begun,
and when all that attracted the notice of the civilized world
to modern Greece was the little preserved to us of her art, —
occasionally and fragmentarily found in the ruins of her great
communities, — a jDcasant of Melos whose name was Theodore
Kondros Botoni, working in his field to enlarge it by clearing
away the debris of the walls and structures of ancient Melos
(which had been built on a steep hill-side, on a series of ter-
races, more or less natural or artificial, so that the ruins of
one terrace fell down upon and encumbered that below it),
saw, to his great bewilderment, the heap of rubbish a\ liicli he
Avas digging away at the bottom suddenly crumble doAvn and
display the upper part of an antique statue. The peasant
hastened to the French consul to inform him of the discovery,
and the latter negotiated the purchase of it for five hundred
piastres and a complete dress of the fashion of the country.
This was the statue known as the Yenus of Melos.

So far, there are no variations of the history, but one ac-
count says that the first or upper part was found several days
before the lower, and the other, that they Avere found to-
gether ; but the inexactitude of the documentary contemj^o-
rary evidence is clear from the examination of the oround to-
day, and from the contradictions contained in it. Dumont
d'Urville, the commander of the Chevrette, a French man-of-
war Avhich visited Melos after the statue Avas found, alludins
to the discovery of the theatre, says : " All the ground is

76 THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

covered with drums of columns and fragments of statues.
One finds here and there great pieces of wall of a very solid
construction, and many imjDortant tombs have been opened
through the curiosity of strangers, and the cupidity of the
inhabitants." But neither the wall nor the tombs, nor any
drum of column or fragment of statue (if any was found),
could have had anything to do with the theatre. The thea-
tre is very late work, and was never nearly finished, so could
have possessed neither columns nor statues. This shows that
the idea the commandant carried away was confused and un-
trustworthy as to details. He goes on to say : *' Three weeks
before our arrival at Melos, a Greek peasant, digging in his
field inclosed in this circuit, struck some pieces of cut stone.
As these stones, employed by the inhabitants, have a certain
value, this induced him to dig farther, and he thus happened
to uncover a species of niche, in which he found a marble
statue, tyvo Hermes, and some other marble fragments. The
statue was in two pieces, joined by two strong iron clamps. The
Greek, fearing to lose the fruit of his labor, had carried the
upper part to a stable. The other was still in the niche. . . .
It represented a naked woman, ivhose left hand raised an apple
and the right held a drapery,^ well composed and falling negli-
gently from the hips to the feet. For the rest, they are both
mutilated, and actually detached from the body.''

I note l)y italics the points which are to be contrasted with
other evidence.

M. Dauriac, captain of the frigate La Bonte, writes from Me-
los, date 11th of April, 1820 : " There has been found, three
days ago, by a peasant who was digging in his field, a marble
statue of renus receiving the apple from Paris. It is larger
than life ; they have at this moment only the bust as far as the
waist. I have been to see it.'' Mr. Brest again writes, 12th of

' The worthlessness of the testimony of hand has ever held or touched this drapery,
d'Urville is shown by this statement — no as the least examination shows.

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS. 11

April : " A peasant has found in a field Avliieli belonged to
him three marble statues, representing, one Venus holding
the apple of discord in one hand, the other represents the cjod
Hermes, and the third a young cJald." The correspondence
shows that Mr. Brest was entirely ignorant of everything con-
nected with archaeology or art. He jirobably heard one of
the officers say that one of the objects was a Hermes, and he
changes it into a statue of the god Hermes, but we sec that
there was only one Hermes. November 26th, Brest again
Avrites : " His Excellency has left me orders to make re-
searches in order to find the arms and other debris of the
statue, but to do that it is necessary to obtain a botiijouronldon
Avhich will permit us to make excavations at our own expense,
becmise in the same niche where it was found there is reason to
hope that we might find other objertsy

The contradictions are so ^^alpable that it is clear that these
documents are only of value as secondary archaeological evi-
dence. No one seems to have made an observation with ex-
actitude.

We have the whole statue found, in one, bound together by
iron clamps ; in another, only half had yet been found ; in
one, the statue is found holding the apple of discord in one
hand ; in another, receiving it from Paris ; and in another
still, we are told that search has been ordered for the arms,
etc.

In 1865 I visited Melos, and having made the acquaint-
ance of Mr. Brest, son and successor of the French consul
who secured the statue for the Louvre, he politely off'ered to
guide me through the ruins of the ancient city. Among other
things, we visited the locality where the statue was found,
and he showed me the niche still standing as when the dis-
covery was made.

It was a slightly built Avork, of the height, as nearlij as I
can remember, of ten or at most tAvelve feet, and about fiAC

78 THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

wide. It formed a part of an old boundary- wall of the field
on which it opened, and aboA^e it the ground was level with
the crown of the arch of the niche. It had no suite or con-
nection with any other structure, except the boundary-wall in
which it was, and there were no evidences of ruin or of foun-
dation of antique buildings about it. The opening had been
closed with rubbish, not with masonry, as was evident from
the face of the side walls, which were of smooth, if not care-
fully laid, masonry. If as I believe not built for the conceal-
ment of the statue, it had been made for some unimportant
purpose ; perhaj)s the j)rotection from the weather of the
poor Hermes Avhich is said to have been found with it. C.
Doupault, architect, has published a brochure with what he
supposed important evidence on the question, in which, from
data given him by old Brest tAventy-seven years after the dis-
covery, he reconstructs the apse of a seventh-century church,
in AAdiich he places the statue. The Avhole study has no value
whatever, as the sketch does not correspond Avith the ruins
which I saAV, and looking back to the correspondence quoted,
it is clear that Brest, knoAving nothing of archaeology or art,
caught at certain suggestions of the officers Avho saw the statue,
and affirmed Avhat they surmised. As to the fragments found,
to Avhich constant reference is made, there is not the slightest
evidence that they Avere found in any connection Avith the
statue, as none of the early evidence indicates that they Avere
knoAvn Avhen the statue Avas first taken under notice — on
the contrary, it is said explicitly by Brest that he had orders
to make researches to find the arms and other portions of the
statue ; indicating clearly that the arms alluded to had not
been found Avith the statue, and that the connection betAveen
them and it Avas an after-thought, either of the peasant, Avho
Avished to increase the value of the statue by connecting Avith
it fragments Avhich he had found in other parts, or of the
archaeologists, avIio, seeking to restore the statue to Avhat

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OE MELOS. 79

they judged to be its true action, connected the arm found,
no one knows where, except at Melos, with the statue. It is
undeniable that when the letters before quoted were written,
there had been only conjecture as to the arms. Dauriac,
writing on the 11th of April, says that they ha\e onl)" found
the bust. Brest, November 26tli, says that there is reason to
hope that they might find other objects /;/ Ihe same niche —
proof that it hud not even then been cleared out. In fact, all
we have of documentary evidence goes for nothing beyond
showing that the statue was found at a certain place on a cer-
tain date ; and if the two halves of the statue did not fit ex-
actly Ave could not be certain that they were found at the
same time and j)hic'e. The hypothesis of the apple of discord
is based on a conjecture of some of the officers, and has no
further confirmation than that an arm and hand, with what
may be an apple or a cup, seem to have been found some-
Avhere in the island about the same time ; but they evidently
are not of the statue, nor even of the same epoch.

Over or somewhere near the niche an inscription was said
to have been found which records the dedication of an exedra
by a gymnasiarch to Hercules and Hermes. The date of this
inscription, according to conjecture based on the inscrijDtion
itself, is about a century before Christ, /. e., long after any
possibility of such a work being produced had gone by.

These are all the positive data we ha^e to work on. They
suffice, however, for about twenty monographs in French,
German, and English ; and a late German work, by Dr. Goeler
von Ravensburg, exhausts all the possible and impossible con-
jectures to establish its character in accordance with the orig-
inal attribution of a Venus receiving the aj^ple.

In the year 1880, I made another visit to Melos, on com-
mission from " The Century " magazine, to photograph what-
CA'cr might remain A^dlich had any connection with the statue ;
but found the niche gone, and no trace of foundations of any

80 THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

kind, or walls, city or other, very near the sj)ot which was
again j^ointed out to me as that where the Yenus was found.

It Avould seem that in the energetic excavation that fol-
lowed the last great archiieological revival, everything that was
suspected to conceal works of art had been dug away.

I found an old man, a pilot well known in our navy, KyjDri-
otis, who had seen the statue when it was brought out, be-
ing a boy of about fourteen. At that time Mr. Brest was a
child, and retained only slight personal recollection of the
event; but it was evident that he, like his father in 1847, had
mingled in his impressions conjecture of others and his own,
with facts perverted, and details conceived without sufficient
basis. Nothing new Avas to be got.

The old Melos is utterly deserted, and the modern town is
built on a pinnacle above it, which does not seem ever to have
been included in the range of the city. The port is changed
from the ancient site, where now a breakwater would be
needed, as the land seems to have sunk greatly, and the old
basin of the jDort is silted up to a point at the bottom of the
bay, where a comjDaratively modern village has grown up,
called Castro.

The magnificent harbor used to make of the island an im-
portant station before telegraphs were established, and might
again, if the telegraph were laid to it ; but now a man-of-war
rarely calls, except to take a jjilot for the Archipelago, and
a Greek steamer stops once in a fortnight. But in heavy
weather, any shi]) caught near runs for Melos. This keeps
the place alive, but it has dwindled to a mere island village,
where the vast labyrinths of tombs which j^erforate the hills
show more human industry than the dwellings of the living.
Earthquakes and malaria have desolated and almost depopu-
lated it.

We had left Cerigo for Crete, and intended to take Melos
on our return to Peirseus, but when within an hour of land

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS. 81

we were caught by a terrific soutli-wester, the most to he
dreaded of all the winds of the ^gean, and in spite of all we
could do we were obliged to give uj^ and run before the gale
where it would send us. It was late in the evening when its
fury came down on us, and taking in all sail excejDt a small
storm-sail at the foot of the mast to keep from coming up
into the wind, we ran before it into the black night. I knew
that there were no rocks ahead before Melos, and if we only
made the island by daylight, we could easily fetch the port ;
but if not, and the yacht ran at night into the little archijDcl-
ago of which Melos is joart, it would be next to imjDossible to
choose where our bones should be laid, for there are no lights,
and many islands and rocks. The sea was, for our little
twelve-ton craft, something fearful, and we thumped and ham-
mered till the little thing quivered, when a wave struck her,
almost as if Ave had come to the rocks. Sleep was out of the
question — to sit or stand, equally so, and we kept to our
berths, as the only way to avoid being j^itc'licd about like
blocks. How long that night was ! and in the middle of it I
attempted to get ujd, and Avhen I put my foot on the cabin-
floor, found myself stepping into the water. We had si^rung
a leak with the straining.

But day came and cheerfulness. We ran in between the
huge clifls which form the portal of Melos harbor, with the
wild surges beating against them till the sjDray flew high
enough to have buried a larger craft than ours. Tired, ach-
ing, and hungry, for nothing could we get to eat till we ar-
rived in port, we cast anchor in the welcome harbor late in
the afternoon. Even then, the sea ran so high that we could
not land until the next day.

Castro is a pile of white houses, rising in terraces from the
shore ; the streets mostly stairways, and the houses all white-
washed till they blind one in that rarely broken sunlight.

I landed, and, as usual, went to the little cafe, where the

82 THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

magnates of the village Avere discussing the arrival and the

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS. (DRAWN BY BIRCH FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.)

storm — the AV(nst, they said, for many years. I called, of

THE SO-CALLED VENCS OF ME LOS. 83

course, on Brest, who, to my surprise, remembered me after
eighteen years ; and we made an appointment to revisit to-
gether the sites I knew, and to see those I had not known be-
fore, — important excavations having been made since my for-
mer visit.

We went first to the new port, where some admirable stat-
ues, since taken to Athens, had been recently found. The
owner of the little field by the water, which occupies the site
of the inner port, having occasion to sink a well, struck the
ruins of a temjDle of Neptune, and three statues were found,
one of Neptune, a female goddess draped, but lacking the
head, and a mounted warrior, apparently Perseus.

The Greek Government, according to their laws, forbade the
exportation of them by any foreign government, and finally
purchased them for thirty thousand francs — certainly a very
small price. I succeeded in seeing them later, still in their
boxes at Athens, and though not equal to the Tenus, or of
the same epoch, they are very fine works.

But there the excavations stop ; the owner had no means
to pump out the water that flooded his diggings, the Govern-
ment had no more, and as no one is allowed to dig unless
for the Greek museum, Avhatever remains under ground and
water is likely to remain there another generation.

We then climbed up the zigzag road to the theatre. It is,
as I have said, of late times, j^robably Roman, and was never
complete. Fragments of unfinished ornament lie still where
the stage should have been, but it had clearly never been
carried up above the seven ranges of seats now existing. It
Avas just outside the wall of the inner city, on the brow of
the hill, and overlooked the spacious harbor and looked out
to sea. There is no record of any sculpture having been
found there. It was purchased and excavated by the King
of Bavaria.

Less than half a mile beyond, going with the sea at our

THE ^0-CALLEB VENUS OF MEL08.

backs, was the field Avherc the statue was found. The Greeks
have entertained a great deal of indignation at the rape,
which they affect to call robbery ; but the civilized world may
thank the French captain Avho, coming to get it, and finding
it already half-embarked on board a Turkish vessel, destined
for Constantinople, made the most legitimate use that was
ever made o^ force majeure, and took it away from the Turk
to transfer it to the hold of his own ship. Otherwise, no one
knows what vile uses it might have gone to, or what oblivion
and destruction. All the world knows it now, but Greek

genius would have forever
lacked one of its greatest
triumphs in modern times if
it had disappeared in the
slums of Stamboul.

As I have said, there is
now no trace of any con-
struction of any kind to be
seen at the locality. The
wall in Avhich was the niche
was gone, and the field of the
present owner has encroached
considerably on the space be-
yond, the debris being piled
up in huge masses like walls, and two or three terraces above
runs the citadel wall, a mass of Hellenic masonry built of blocks
of lava. The Pelasgic Avails, of Avhich some authors speak, do
not exist anyAvhere in the island. Brest took up a stone, and
as Ave stood on the Avail of debris above, cast it into the field,
and said, " There stood the Venus ! " In the illustration I
have put a Avhite cross on the spot.

There cannot remain the slightest doubt that the statue
had been concealed, and to my mind, the circumstances indi-
cated for its concealment are these : The niche, judging from

STREET IN CASTRO.

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

its character, had been built in Roman times ; as the rubbly
nature of the masonry indicated, probably covered with
stucco, as it would have been if intended for ornament, and
was designed as a shelter for an altar, or for the statue of
some divinity — Terminus, Hermes, Pan or Faunus, the more
Eoman companion of him. Here the inscriiDtiou and the
Hermes found furnish a plausible clew, and agree with the in-
dication of the masonry in pointing out the epoch ol' this con-
junction of circumstances as subsequent to the second century
before Christ ; how long after w^e cannot in any wise indicate.

THE SITE OF OLD MELOS, FROM THE PORT. (WHITE CROSS SHOWS WHERE THE "VEXUS"

WAS FOUND.)

Now as to the epoch of the statue there can be no doubt
that it was of the immediately post-Phidian epoch ; and all
the most authoritative opinions attribute it to the Attic
school, and j)i"obably of the time and school of Scopas — and
some of the weightiest authorities have accepted Scopas him-
self as the author.

Anything more definite than this it is impossible to estab-
lish by any now known evidence. The concealment of the
statue, then, was several centuries later than the execution
of it.

86 THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

The Greeks of the chissical epoch, even clown to the first
century after Christ, retained, amidst all the degradation of
their contemporary art, a distinct recognition of the excellence
of the elder work, as the enormous artistic as well as pecuni-
ary value of some of the masters' chefs d'muvre prove. That
this was one of them, and of one of the chief masters, all
civilization agrees, and, although we have lost the name of
the author, the people Avho hid it must have known it well.
The availing themselves of the niche, ready-made to their
hands, indicates that the possessors of the statue worked in
haste, piling up stones in front of the niche, instead of walling
it up.

This indicates the haste of impending attack, or work done
in secret. In either case, if the statue had a temj^le in that
locality, it would be concealed near it, or near the place
where it was accustomed to stand ; but no such temiDle is
known. We may remember the contrast with the colossal
and magnificent Hercules found in a drain at Rome, carefully
covered over with good masonry. Concealment was the ob-
ject in both cases, and the greater haste and furtiveness with
the Melian statue indicate rather that it was brought from a
distance than that it could be a divinity of the island.

Conjecture as to the origin of the statue, if my hypothesis
is true, points to Athens, not only because the work is Attic,
but because we know by the coins of Melos, which in all the
latest coinages still bear the owl of Athens, that Melos be-
longed to that city as late as she had any Greek allegiance,
which must have been some time into the Empire, as the Ro-
mans long made it a policy to preserve a certain kind of au-
tonomy in the Greek states, even when their subjection was
complete. That it is Attic, no one can doubt in face of the
evidence I shall show. That Athens was the only city likely
to send to Melos a treasure of this kind, concealment of
which was imjDOssible in Athens, is almost certain.

THE HO-CALLED VENU>^ OE 3IEL0S. 87

I conclude that it was a higlily yalued statue of Athens,
sent to Melos in time of great danger, to be concealed and
preserved. What period this might have been is only to be
guessed at ; it is therefore hardly worth Avhile to say more
about it, except to indicate that four periods in late Atheiiian
history might furnish the motive requisite : when the army of
Mithridates, under Archelaus, took Athens ; the wars between
the factions of Marius and Sylla ; the Lacedemonian war, and
the invasions of the Iconoclasts. The Romans do not appear,
in spite of all their jDlundering and the enormous quantity of
statues carried away from Greece, to have desecrated the tem-
ples of the Greek gods, as we see that Pausanias, in the cen-
tury after Christ, found the most valuable of them in situ, as,
for instance, the Diana Brauronia of Praxiteles, the Perseus of
Myron, with others of great flune. The above conclusion, con-
sidering all the knoAvn and reasonably conjccturable details of
the discovery and concealment, seems to me justifiable, — as
well as that it was concealed at some time between the cen-
tury or two centuries before Christ and the end of the first
century after.

Now, what was the statue ? We have so long been in the
habit of accepting all female statues, not distinguished by well-
known symbols of their divinity, as Venuses, that we make no
distinction even in cases where the type demands it. And
yet the dominant characteristic of Greek sculpture is this
close adherence to established types. We are never at a loss
to distinguish Diana, Minerva, Juno, or even Ceres and the
lesser deities. Venus, it is true, came into vogue as subject
for the sculptors of sacred statues later than some of the
others ; but all that we know of the Yenus of the artists in-
dicates that it was j)ar excellence the womanly tyjDe. The
treatment of the head in Greek sculpture was a point aj)par-
ently of doctrine, as it was in Byzantine and in the later
ecclesiastical art of Greece. It is always in a conventional
type, utterly separated from the individual.

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

This unquestionable fact should have taught us to reject
from the Venus category many statues which are now in-
cluded in it, as for instance, the Callipyge, and all in which a
trace of portraiture is to be found, besides diminishing that
category by all the statues of the heroic tyjie, as in none of the
legends of beliefs of the Greek faith was Venus ever endowed
with a heroic quality. The preconceived notion that the
Melian statue was a Venus has been a continual cause of con-
fusion. This was, as I have shown, the first hypothesis of

MEDICBAN VENUS,

VENUS URANIA.

CAPITOLINE VENUS.

the French officers, none of whom appear to have been pos-
sessed of any archseological knowledge, and who had the com-
monlv prevailing notion that any nude statue must be a Venus.
I have taken the pains to collect a number of representations
of the various so-called Vcnuses, and most of which the type,
or symbols, justify us in so classifying ; and a comparison of
their character will show what is the Venus type, — making
this proviso, hoAvever, that we have no other than internal
evidence for denominating most of them Venuses. The chief
of these, in Avhat Ave seek for most, i. e., the impersonal type,
which Avas inseparable from the Greek deities doAvn through

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELXJS.

the decline of art, Avhicli began in the time of Alexander,
are : the Medici, a distinctly marked Attic work, later, how-
ever, than the Melian statue ; the Capitoliue, ap2)arently a
still later reminiscence of the Medici and one of many similar
reminiscences ; and the " Venus coming out of the l)ath," at
Naples, a better work than the last, but still already widely
separated from the purely conventional type of the Medicean,
which we may authoritatively accept as the Venus type of
the best period of the Venus sculpture. The close compari-

VENUS OF THE VATICAN,

VENUS ANADTOMENE.

VENUS VICTRIX OF THE LOUVRE.

son of the heads and details of the flesh will give those Avho
do not know the originals an invaluable lesson in the treat-
ment of the figure in Greek art. The so - called " Venus
Urania," at Florence, marks, to my mind, a distinct departure
from the Venus type, — so marked, indeed, as to make me
decline to accept it as a Venus, while the still typical char-
acter of the face is one Avliich must place it in a good period
of art, before ideality of treatment had entirely given way to
individviality. The art is of too good an epoch to have de-
parted so for from the type of Venus, if intended for her, and
indicates rather a nymph, or some inferior deity. The Venus

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

of the Vatican is too late and too low down in the scale of art
to be an authoritative witness in the matter ; while the Yenus
Anadyoniene, while still reserving the ideal character, resem-
bles the Urania rather> in a sej)aration of the tyj)e from the
Venus. Later still, and perhaps at the end of that period
which may be called the ideal period of antique scul^Dture,
most probably of Grseco-Roman art, is the Venus Victrix of
the Louvre ; unquestionably a Venus, for she bears in her
hand the apple — symbol of fi'uitfulness. But how far from

VENUS OF CAPUA.

RESTORATION OF THE STATUE AS
PROPOSED BY MK. TARRAL.

the type of our Melian treasure ! In that is the most distinct
approach to the Athena type — a purely heroic ideal. I can-
not believe that its sculjjtor intended it for a Venus.

The jDatient German admirer of our statue, which Von
Ravensburg is, has gone through all the literature and all the
conjectures which it has given rise to, as to the chief problem
which gives interest to any investigation, i. <?., the restoration
of the statue. No attemjit Avill satisfy all the investigators ;
but that which Von Ravensburg accepts with approval ^ — viz.,
the restoration of Mr. Tarral (an Englishman residing in Paris
for many years, who has given his chief attention to this prob-

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF ME LOS.

lem) — shows so entire a want of apj^reciation of the char-
acter of antique design, which is, after all, our only cleAV, that
I shall not hesitate to j)ut aside, not only the solution pro-
posed, but the judgment that could accejDt as satisfactory such
a solution of one of the most interesting of artistic problems.
I give the figure which Von Ravensburg jDviblishes as Tarral's
restoration of the statue, that one may see how absolutely its
inanity is at variance with the spirit of Greek design. The
mere completion of the statue, in this sense, destroys the
dignity and unity of the work so completely that to look at
it is enough for a cultivated judgment to decide that, what-
ever it may have been, this it was not. The author gives,
also, photographs of the fragments found — fragments so im-

FRAGMKNTS FOUND AT MELOS ATTRIBVTED TO THE STATUE.

perfect and corroded that we can only say that they appear
to be from a very low period of art, and are utterly worthless
as data for measure or opinion, from their extremely frag-
mentary state.

Besides, I have shown, from the records of discovery, that
there is no further reason to connect them with the statue
than that they were also found at Melos.

In followino; the whole course of the demonstration which
Von Ravensburg attempts of this solution of the problem, I
arrive at the conclusion that, with all his patience and re-
search, his judgment is utterly untrustworthy on a problem
which requires not only freedom from preconception, but long
cultivation of artistic perception and general critical ability.
Mr. Tarral's attempt proves, to my mind, only that this Avas
not the solution.

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

The various suggestions, more or less authoritative, made
as to the restoration, and thence as to the determination of
the attributes of the statue, are to be summed up briefly.
The Count de Chirac, the then curator of the antiques of the
Louvre, adopted the Venus with the apple hyj^othesis, but
afterward abandoned it in favor of one put forward by Mil-
lingcn, that it was a Victory. This is one of the theories of
the restoration which has found the greatest number of adlier-

VICTORT OF BRESCIA — FRONT.

VICTORY OF BRESCIA — SIDE.

ents. Several restorations have been proposed, which make
the statue part of a group, all which, though defended or j)ro-
posed by many dileltaaii, I reject, for what to me seem suffi-
cient reasons, viz. : FirsUy, we have in the statue no evi-
dence whatever that it formed part of a group, and without
some such the hypothesis is gratuitous ; 'Second! ij, we have
— with one excej^tion, which I shall presently note, and
which gives no countenance to such a theory — no statue or
parts of statues which agree with it in artistic quality, or

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF ME LOS. 93

even none which lend themselves to a grouj), if such were
made up by various sculptors ; Thirdhj, that, at the ei^och in
which the statue Avas jDroduced, any group which has been
suaa-ested would have been out of accordance with the aims
of art, as jDracticed by the Greeks. The only evidence in
favor of such a theory is that in some antique fragments or
coins are indications of such
a figure as the Mclian in
combination. But, as this
statue must have been in its
own time nearly as cele-
brated, relatively, as in ours,
it must have given rise to
many imitations and adapta-
tions. It may have given
rise to some which suj^port
the group theory, but to
more which support an op-
posing theory.

Von Ravensburg goes over,
in detail, all the group the-
ories, and easily finds fatal
objections to all. What
most surprises me is that
any one ever tried to put it
into a group, so completely

by itscll does it stand m victory raising an offering (temple of nik£

APTEROS, THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS).

every sense of the word.

Millingen, in 1826, started his theory that it was a Victory
holding a shield in both hands. I am quite convinced that
many who have started other theories would have adojDted
this if they had not been anticipated in proposing it. The
vanity of archa3ological research, and eagerness to propose
something new is so dominant in most archaeologists that

94 THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

tliey exercise more ingenuity to advance some new theory
than woukl be requisite to show the yaHclity of an old one.
And the statue of Mclos has been preeminent in fruitfuhiess
of theories of all qualities and grades of improbability. Mil-
lingen, however, supported his theory by a similar statue
known as the Capuan Venus, a reproduction, I believe, in
Roman times, of the Melian statue, probably through some
other intermediate copy or reproduction, as the sculptors of
the Ca2Duan statue could not have seen the Melian. The
arms are a modern and abominable restoration. Here, again,
I mvist, in passing, protest against the attribution to the
Venus tyj)e of all nude or semi-nude statues. There is noth-
ing in the Capuan which indicates that it was intended as a
Venus. Millingen quotes Apollonius of Rhodes as describing
a statue of Venus looking at herself in the shield of Mars,
which she herself is holding, but this is no evidence of the
type correspondence, and the gravamen of the matter lies
precisely in the diversity of the type from the recognizable
Venuses. But the CajDuan is too far in type and treatment
from the Melian to serve as definite argument. Such as it is,
an item in the discussion, I will not exaggerate its impor-
tance, though I believe it to be a far-away recollection of the
Melian statue.

" The Victory of Brescia " is another of the recollections,
rather than reproductions, of the tyjie of which I believe the
Melian statue to be the original. It is in bronze, is later, and
has the wings, but the type is unmistakable, and the action
of the torso and head is sufficiently different from our statue
to shoAV that it was only an emulation, and not a plagiarism,
that was intended.

The drapery differs in the arrangement, being of bronze and
agreeing with some undisputed Victories at Athens, but the
action of the left leg holding the shield is the same, and that
of the arms corresponds very nearly, as far as the arms remain

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS. 95

in the Melian work. As a whole, it reminds one more of
the hitter than does any other of the statnes of its chiss.

The case is one in which archaeological knoAvledge is of very
little value, unless it be aided by thorough artistic study and
a knowledge of the requirements of art proj^er. The arclias-
ologist, like other scientists, must have positive evidence to
work on ; and the testimony of pure taste, the intuitions of
an artistic education, are of no use to him except as confirma-
tory. The intuition of the artist, whose taste has been edu-
cated by long study of the works he has to deal with, arrives
at opinions by a kind of inspiration to which science often
lacks all means of access. In the case of this statue, archae-
ology has no evidence to weigh, and the jjonderous erudition
which Overbeck, Miiller, Jalin, Welcker, and others have
piled on the question has no foundation. We can determine
with comparative certainty that the statue belongs to the
epoch between Phidias and Praxiteles, because we have the
work of the school of Phidias and sufficient comparative data
for that of Praxiteles [and now, since the discovery of the
Hermes at Olymjiia, positive data] to judge from ; and we have
a right to say that the Meliaii statue came between these, but
beyond this nothing — no clew except what lies in the design
and the unities attendant on it, of which per se the professed
archaeologist is no judge.

In working about the Acrojoolis of Athens some years ago,
I photographed, amongst other sculjjtures, the mutilated Vic-
tories in the Temple of Nike Apteros, the " Wingless Vic-
tory," the little Ionic temple in Avhich stood that statue of
Victory of which it is said that " the Athenians made her witJt-
out wings thai she might never leave Athens " ; and looking at
the jDhotographs afterward, when the impression of the com-
paratively diminutive size had passed, I was struck with the
close resemblance of the type to that of the " Venus " of Me-
los. There are the same large, heroic jDroportions, the same

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

VICTORY UNTYING HER SANDAL (TEMPLE OF NIK:fc APTEROS, THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS).

ampleness in the development of the nude parts, the same art
in the management of the draperies, and Richard Greenough,

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

the American sculjotor, has called my particular attention to
the curious similarity in the treatment of the folds of the
di'apery, in the introduction of a plane between the folds, a
resemblance not found in any other similar works as far as I
know.

They are little high reliefs, part of a balustrade which sur-

VICTORIES LEADING A BULL TO SACRIFICE (TEMPLE OF m.'&.t. APTEROS, THE ACROPOLIS, ATHENS).

rounded the cortile of the Temple of Nike Apteros, hardly
three feet high in their perfect state, and now without heads
or hands or feet. There are four of them : one apparently
untying her sandal ; another, — that which best shows the type
of the figure — raising an oflPering or crown, and two others
leading a bull to sacrifice. I gire the series. Note the ex-
quisite composition of the drapery below the knee of the
Victory raising the offering, and the superb flow of the entire
draperies in the sandal-tying figure, but, above all, the Yic-

98 THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

tory type in the Avholc assemblage. How absolutely it agrees
with that of the Melian statue, and how utterly alone in all
antique art that is but for these !

Since I have begun this study, it has twice happened that
artist friends trained in the French school (^. e., in the only
school which cultivates the perception of style in design, and
the only one that emulates the Greek in its characteristics),
both trained di'aughtsmen, came into my room, and without
any remark I showed them the photographs of the Victories
at Athens. They were new to both, but in one case as in the
other the first expression was : " How like the Yenus of Ma-
les ! " And the similarity runs through the treatment of
every part — the management of drapery to express the action
of the limbs, the firm, heroic mould of the figure, and the
modeling of the round contours. Comj^are (in the casts, if
possible, as the small scale of my illustrations Avill not show
the point so clearly) the right shoulder of the Venus with
that in the stooping Victory, The slight differences which
exist are just what might be expected between a figure which
stands as principal, isolated, and to be seen from all sides, and
one which was secondary, subordinate, of partial decorative
use, and to be seen only in one view. My illustrations will
hardly convey the strikingness of the similarity, but I defy
any one to compare side by side the series of Victories and
the Melian statue in casts and not admit that the type, the
treatment, the ideal, are the same, as sisters may be the same,
or at least as mother and daughter.

The little Temple of Nike Apteros had once, we know, a
statue of Victory without wings, and we know the bon mot,
which I have given above, which it suggested. The decora-
tions of the temple are attributed to Scopas and his school,
and this Victory was unique, so far as we know, in being
wingless. We may Avell conceive, with the symbolical mean-
ing . — talismanic, rather — implied in what we know of it by

THE SO-GALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

this witticism, that the Athenians would have a sjoecial anxiety
to keep it from becoming a trophy in the hands of an enemy,
even one Avho might not be disclosed to desecrate the temples
of the greater gods. Nike was rather an attribute or varia-
tion of Athena than a distinct goddess, and was as such both
of great value to the Athenians, being the alter ego of their
patroness ; and of less reverence to the enemy, as not Minerva

THE SO-CALLED VEKUS OF
MELOS— FRONT.

THE "VENUS" RESTORED— FRONT.

(TRACED FROM A PHOTOGRAPH

OF A LIVING MODEL.)

herself. At all events, when Pausanias visited Athens the
Nike Apteros had gone. Her temple still stood there, and
near it on the Acropolis hill stood some of the greatest art-
treasures of the antique world untouched.

My theory, open to the grave objection that it is one in
which hypothesis bears an undue proportion to proven fact
(yet not so great as any of the group theories, and hardly
more than any other theory, for all are constructed out of the

100

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

same aerial substance), is that the Melian statue is the orig-
inal Nike Apteros from the little temple on the Acropolis of
Athens. If so, one can understand the whole of my theory
of concealment, attribution, and type, because this statue
above all others would come under the rancor of a victor and
its flight would become an humiliation to Athens. It was like
the standard of a defeated army, to be kejat at all hazards

"VENUS" RESTORED — SIDE. (TRACED FROM
A PHOTOGRAPH OF A LIVINIi MODEL.)

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF
MELOS — SIDE.

from the enemy. Hurried away to Melos, it was safe from
the invader, but no nearer point was secure. The restoration
in my hypothesis becomes that of the Victory in some attitude
connected with regarding, or recording, on the shield or a
tablet the names of the Attic heroes, or battles, and my opin-
ion is that she has just finished writing, but I am disjaosed to
uncertainty on the exact phase of the action, only insisting
on that of the Recorder. The minutiae of description of
many antique works of art which Ave owe to Pausanias and

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS. 101

Pliny was plainly imj^ossible with this. Neither ever saw
it, but its memory existed in artistic tradition and has been
repeated in the statues we have seen, probably only a few of
those which once existed.

Yon Ravensburg sums up the objections to the shield-bear-
ing Victory and to the theory of Millingeu as follows : The
theory would indicate that she leaned back to balance the
weight of the shield, but the objections urged are that if the
shield were larger it would hide too much (yet in an earlier
part of the book the statement is made that a part of the
figure, and just that part covered by the shield, is compara-
tively unfinished, which has given rise to the theory of a
group in which one side of the statue was hidden) ; if it were
small, the weight would not be enough to account for the at-
titude. And, in the next breath, he urges that the grand
heroic character is an objection to Iter struggling ivith a burden.
But if a goddess, and of this robust type, the burden ought
not to ojipress her, however great, humanly speaking. But
in point of fact there is no noteworthy degree of backAvard
inclination. To test the question, I photographed a model in
the attitude required to hold a shield on her left knee and
write on it.

The result was very slightly diff'crent from that of the
statue. A part of the backward action of the model was
due to the necessity of a support to enable her to remain in
the pose necessary to be photographed, but the action of writ-
ing is better expressed by the statue.

The action of the statue is that of a figure Avhich stands
nearly balanced and in repose, with the first movement in a
forward action, like one who reaches out to give, take, or
write, or any similar action or the moment after the action is
comjjlete. The particular moment we cannot determine with-
out the possession of the fore-arms. Von Ravensburg goes on
to say that he does not mean to afiirm that the holding of a

102 THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

shield does not suit the action of the upper part of the body,
but maintains that it does not explain it particularly well.
But after the inane restoration given forth with his high ap-
proval, we may be permitted to doubt that his artistic taste
has been as carefully developed as his archaeological acumen.
He quotes Overbeck as objecting to the shield resting on the
left knee, that there are no traces on the left thigh which
the shield must have left ; but Wittig and Von Liitzow have
recognized these very marks, and they are distinctly visible
even in the cast, as far as would be exjDccted if a bronze
shield merely rested on the di'apery, and the shield, if there
was one, was in all probability of bronze, held well out from
the body, and resting on the knee raised for that purjDose, the
foot being suj^ported by a helmet lying on the ground. But,
further, he says these considerations are quite superfluous,
for the position of the left leg of the Mclian statue con-
tradicts the shield-supporting, and he quotes in support Ya-
lentin, that the left thigh would incline outward to secure
a balance, and that the supporting of a heavy object on the
thigh thrown in would violate the laws of equilibrium. That
this is not true is sho^^Ti by the " Victory of Brescia," in
which the action is precisely this, and the pose of the thigh
is the same as that of the Melian statue. Moreover, I tried
a model again in this view, and the result is given in the illus-
tration.

The knee took quite readily the action indicated, and, in-
deed, would be compelled to by the pressure of the shield if
the weight rested partly on the left hand, as it must to have
left the right free for any action whatever. Both nature and
the antique assert precisely the contrary to that which Valen-
tin assumes. The length to which the argument against this
restoration is carried by him may be judged from the asser-
tion that the action of the " Victory of Brescia " is that of an
outAvard push of the left thigh, to make it agree with that of

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS. 103

the theory Von Ravensburg lays down. But the assertion is
purely gratuitous. If the Brescian bronze is an argument,
as far as it goes it obviates every difficulty in the interpreta-
tion of the Melian statue by taking, so far as the action of
the limbs is concerned, the very action of the latter.

There is but one objection to the restoration theory I pro-
pose which deserves serious consideration — that of the god-
dess looking off or above the point at which she would be writ-
ing if she were writmg. Half the ingenuity displayed in many
of the proposed restorations, or half the sophistry employed
by Von Ravensburg to combat this, would carry us over much
greater difficulties. In later Greek work, when art was
sought for its own sake, and consistency continually sacrificed
to the grace of a pose and harmony of the lines, we should
not be surprised at the goddess looking at one point and writ-
ing at another ; bvit at this period the dramatic unities were
sacred alike in poetry as in art. But I suppose that, unlike
the Brescian statue, she is not at the moment engaged in
writing, but pausing as having just finished, and, looking out
from her pedestal in the little temple, gazes out toward Mara-
thon, in which direction the temj^le opens, and this is no dif-
ficulty in the restoration. A little of that kind of imagination
so much abused in modern art-criticism, which consists in at-
tributing to the artist all the fancies which arise in our minds
in the contemplation of his work, all the flir - fetched and
poetic visions our own eyes have conjured up, would supply
all deficiencies in our theory.

But while I maintain tliat my theory has more accordances
with the knoAvn facts and actual qualities of the statue than
any other, and presents fewer gaps in the demonstration, I am
unwilling to lay down any theory not sustainable by what we
know of Greek art, and I admit the difficulty as frankly as
I state those of other theories. Doing so, however, I still
maintain that not only is there the means of reconciliation of

104

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

my hypothesis of an actual shield-inscribing Victory with the
statvie as it is, but even in case I am compelled to abandon
this particular point, and advocate the modification of Mil-
lingen that she holds the shield with both hands and looks at
it, my main hypothesis — that the statue is a Victory and no
Venus, and the particular wingless Victory of Athens — is
untouched. We do not know what the Nike Apteros was
doing. AVliat we can see is that this statue was more proba-
bly holding a shield, either contemplatively, or pausing, just
ijff^A, hav ing written on it, than taking any other

action.

If we may accept the analogy of the
Apollo Belvidere, which also looks ofi" in the
same inexplicable way, it would illustrate
my hypothesis still further, but the Apollo
is later and less dramatic. If we hold to the
strict dramatic quality of the best Greek art,
we must suppose that the goddess has just
finished writing, and looks uj) and out to-
ward the field where her heroes died. Or
even if the shield was a high one, such as
the Spartan wounded used to be brought
home on, she might still be looking at the shield, if not at the
words she has just written. In fact, several suggestions offer
th' mselves, and none open to accusation of such flagrant in-
consistencies as those involved in Tarral's restoration, which
shocks the dramatic sense beyond endurance.

The objection that the shield would hide so large a part of
the figure goes for absolutely nothing. We continually find
Greek work completely, or nearly, finished in j^ositions where
by necessity much of it must have been hidden. As the
pediments of the Parthenon were originally placed, they
wovild never have been half seen, and how the Panathenaic
frieze could have been adequately seen, once the building

VICTORY OF COSSANI.

THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

105

scaffolds were taken down, we can much less easily conjecture
than how the Victory could have been seen behind her shield.
The Brescian, a later and more realistic work, is seen behind
hers. Consani has made a very hapj)y emulation of the mo-
tive in his Victory. It is amongst the best of the modern
Italian works of its class, and illustrates the manner of avoid-
ing the difficulties we have seen adduced. The iDrincij)al ar-
guments in favor of my theory are these : The statue is not
of the Venus type but on the contrary agrees distinctly with

TEMPLE OF NIK:^ APTEROS.

known statues of Victory, some of which I have indicated, of
which another is in the coin of Agathocles, and in the Mu-
seum of Naples is a terra cotta Victory in almost the identical
action and drapery ; it is of the epoch of the Victories of the
temple of Nike Apteros, and of the same style of treatment
and type of figure ; it was found where we might expect the
Athenians to hide a treasure ; and, while unquestionably a
Victory, it is the only wingless Victory of the great Attic
school we know of. I do not consider this archteological, but
artistic demonstration.

The little Temple of Nike Apteros has had a destiny unique

106 THE SO-CALLED VENUS OF MELOS.

amongst its kind. Like the Parthenon, it was standing little
more than two hundred years ago, but during the Turkish oc-
cupation it was razed, and its stones all built into the great
bastion which covered the front of the Acropolis and blocked
up the staircase to the Propykiea. It was dug out and re-
stored, nearly every stone in its place, by two German archi-
tects during the reign of Otho, and it stands again as Pausa-
nias describes it, on the spot where old ^geus watched for
the return of Theseus from Crete, and seeing the black sails
of his son's ship returning, token of failure (for Theseus had
forgotten to raise the white sail, the signal of success), threw
himself from the precipice, and was dashed into black death
on the rocks below. In the distance are Salamis and ^gina,
and the straits through which the ships came from Melos
and Crete, and to the south is Hymettus, beyond which are
Marathon and the road by which the Persians came, and the
Turks after them. There certainly was the spot, and this the
occasion, if ever, that an Attic sculjDtor should feel that spir-
itual enthusiasm below which Greek art stopped and lost the
clew which, in later centuries, the Florentine found again
and followed to new, if not higher, heights.

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Full text of "On the track of Ulysses; together with an excursion in quest of the so-called Venus of Melos: two studies in archaeology, made during a cruise among the Greek islands"

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